Are Layout-Infused Language Models Robust to Layout Distribution Shifts? A Case Study with Scientific Documents

Catherine Chen, Zejiang Shen, Dan Klein, Gabriel Stanovsky, Doug Downey, Kyle Lo


Abstract
Recent work has shown that infusing layout features into language models (LMs) improves processing of visually-rich documents such as scientific papers. Layout-infused LMs are often evaluated on documents with familiar layout features (e.g., papers from the same publisher), but in practice models encounter documents with unfamiliar distributions of layout features, such as new combinations of text sizes and styles, or new spatial configurations of textual elements. In this work we test whether layout-infused LMs are robust to layout distribution shifts. As a case study we use the task of scientific document structure recovery, segmenting a scientific paper into its structural categories (e.g., “title”, “caption”, “reference”). To emulate distribution shifts that occur in practice we re-partition the GROTOAP2 dataset. We find that under layout distribution shifts model performance degrades by up to 20 F1. Simple training strategies, such as increasing training diversity, can reduce this degradation by over 35% relative F1; however, models fail to reach in-distribution performance in any tested out-of-distribution conditions. This work highlights the need to consider layout distribution shifts during model evaluation, and presents a methodology for conducting such evaluations.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.844
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13345–13360
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.844
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.844
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Catherine Chen, Zejiang Shen, Dan Klein, Gabriel Stanovsky, Doug Downey, and Kyle Lo. 2023. Are Layout-Infused Language Models Robust to Layout Distribution Shifts? A Case Study with Scientific Documents. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 13345–13360, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Are Layout-Infused Language Models Robust to Layout Distribution Shifts? A Case Study with Scientific Documents (Chen et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.844.pdf
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 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.844.mp4