Document Understanding

Document understanding studies how systems read and reason over documents such as forms, reports, historical manuscripts, and technical drawings, enabling search, extraction, and analysis at scale. Approaches combine OCR and layout analysis with vision-language models, specialized document models, retrieval-augmented generation, and agents that gather and verify evidence. Systems can perform well on focused tasks, but complex layouts, handwriting, long documents, and cross-page reasoning remain difficult; benchmarks such as DocVQA and real-world form and long-document evaluations expose these gaps. A central tension is how to balance general-purpose multimodal models with specialized OCR and structured pipelines that can be more reliable, efficient, and auditable.