Structured information extraction from long, multilingual scanned financial documents is a core requirement in industrial KYC and compliance workflows. These documents are typically non machine readable, noisy, and visually heterogeneous. They usually span dozens of pages while containing only sparse task relevant information. Although recent vision-language models achieve strong benchmark performance, directly applying them end to end to full financial reports often leads to unreliable extraction under real world conditions. We present a multistage extraction framework that integrates image preprocessing, multilingual OCR, hybrid page-level retrieval, and compact VLM-based structured extraction. The design separates page localization from multimodal reasoning, enabling more accurate extraction from complex multipage documents. We evaluated the framework on 120 production KYC documents comprising about 3000 multilingual scanned pages. Across multiple OCR-VLM combinations, the proposed pipeline consistently outperforms direct PDF-to-VLM baselines, improving field-level accuracy by up to 31.9 percentage points. The best configuration, PaddleOCR with MiniCPM2.6, achieves 87.27 percent accuracy. Ablation studies show that page-level retrieval is the dominant factor in performance improvements, particularly for complex financial statements and non-English documents.
In this paper, we propose LingDT-VL-OCR, a document parsing system tailored to financial-domain documents, transforming ultra-long financial PDFs into semantically consistent, highly accurate, structured outputs with auditing-grade provenance. To address finance-specific challenges such as complex layouts, cross-page structural discontinuities, and cell-level referencing capability, LingDT-VL-OCR combines (1) a Cross-page Contents Consolidation algorithm to restore continuity across pages and a Document-level Heading Hierarchy Reconstruction (DHR) module to build a globally consistent Table of Contents (TOC) tree for structure-aware retrieval, and (2) a difficulty-adaptive curriculum learning training strategy for table parsing, together with a CellBBoxRegressor module that uses structural anchor tokens to localize table cells from decoder hidden states without external detectors. Experiments demonstrate that our model shows high performance on the Overall metric of OmniDocBench. To enable realistic evaluation in the financial vertical, we further introduce FinDocBench, a benchmark that includes six financial document categories with expert-verified annotations and evaluation metrics including Table of Contents edit-distance-based similarity (TocEDS), cross-page concatenated TEDS, and Table Cell Intersection over Union (C-IoU). We evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art models on FinDocBench to assess their capabilities and remaining limitations on financial documents. Overall, LingDT-VL-OCR and FinDocBench provide a practical foundation for reliable downstream financial document applications.
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to extract structured fields from business documents, yet most evaluations report accuracy on clean benchmarks and offer little guidance to practitioners choosing an approach for a given task complexity. We address this gap with a measurement-grounded study and an open-source release. Across eleven systems (three commercial, two reasoning, five open-source VLMs in pretrained and fine-tuned form, and a non-LLM OCR->regex floor) scored on a 750-document held-out pool of synthetic checks, fine-tuning on 3K samples lifts the best open-source VLMs above F1 0.98-above every zero-shot commercial system on this task-while GPT-5 leads the commercial pool on F1 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 collapses on Date. To turn these measurements into actionable choices, we introduce a practitioner-oriented selection framework that maps a task profile (quality, latency, governance, volume) to a recommended approach via filtering and total-cost minimization, illustrated on a hypothetical mid-volume document-extraction scenario.
We present LightOnOCR-2-1B, a 1B-parameter end-to-end multilingual vision--language model that converts document images (e.g., PDFs) into clean, naturally ordered text without brittle OCR pipelines. Trained on a large-scale, high-quality distillation mix with strong coverage of scans, French documents, and scientific PDFs, LightOnOCR-2 achieves state-of-the-art results on OlmOCR-Bench while being 9× smaller and substantially faster than prior best-performing models. We further extend the output format to predict normalized bounding boxes for embedded images, introducing localization during pretraining via a resume strategy and refining it with RLVR using IoU-based rewards. Finally, we improve robustness with checkpoint averaging and task-arithmetic merging. We release model checkpoints under Apache 2.0, and publicly release the dataset and LightOnOCR-bbox-bench evaluation under their respective licenses.
Said Taghadouini, Adrien Cavaillès, Baptiste Aubertin