Tag, Copy or Predict: A Unified Weakly-Supervised Learning Framework for Visual Information Extraction using Sequences

Tag, Copy or Predict: A Unified Weakly-Supervised Learning Framework for Visual Information Extraction using Sequences

Jiapeng Wang, Tianwei Wang, Guozhi Tang, Lianwen Jin, Weihong Ma, Kai Ding, Yichao Huang

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1082-1090. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/150

Visual information extraction (VIE) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The existing methods usually first organized optical character recognition (OCR) results in plain texts and then utilized token-level category annotations as supervision to train a sequence tagging model. However, it expends great annotation costs and may be exposed to label confusion, the OCR errors will also significantly affect the final performance. In this paper, we propose a unified weakly-supervised learning framework called TCPNet (Tag, Copy or Predict Network), which introduces 1) an efficient encoder to simultaneously model the semantic and layout information in 2D OCR results, 2) a weakly-supervised training method that utilizes only sequence-level supervision; and 3) a flexible and switchable decoder which contains two inference modes: one (Copy or Predict Mode) is to output key information sequences of different categories by copying a token from the input or predicting one in each time step, and the other (Tag Mode) is to directly tag the input sequence in a single forward pass. Our method shows new state-of-the-art performance on several public benchmarks, which fully proves its effectiveness.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Language and Vision
Computer Vision: Recognition: Detection, Categorization, Indexing, Matching, Retrieval, Semantic Interpretation
Natural Language Processing: Information Extraction