

The abstract from the paper is the following:
Pre-training techniques have been verified successfully in a variety of NLP tasks in recent years. Despite the
widespread use of pretraining models for NLP applications, they almost exclusively focus on text-level manipulation,
while neglecting layout and style information that is vital for document image understanding. In this paper, we propose
the LayoutLM to jointly model interactions between text and layout information across scanned document images, which is
beneficial for a great number of real-world document image understanding tasks such as information extraction from
scanned documents. Furthermore, we also leverage image features to incorporate words' visual information into LayoutLM.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that text and layout are jointly learned in a single framework for
document-level pretraining. It achieves new state-of-the-art results in several downstream tasks, including form
understanding (from 70.72 to 79.27), receipt understanding (from 94.02 to 95.24) and document image classification
(from 93.07 to 94.42).
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