Enhancing Document Understanding with Group Position Embedding: A Novel Approach to Incorporate Layout Information

Recent advancements in document understanding have been dominated by leveraging large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large models. However, enabling LLMs to comprehend complex document layouts and structural information often necessitates intricate network modifications or costly pre-training, limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we introduce Group Position Embedding (GPE), a novel and efficient technique to enhance the layout understanding capabilities of LLMs without architectural changes or additional pre-training. GPE achieves this by strategically grouping the attention heads and feeding each group with distinct positional embeddings, effectively encoding layout information relevant to document comprehension. This simple yet powerful method allows for effective integration of layout information within the existing LLM framework. We evaluate GPE against several competitive baselines across five mainstream document tasks. We also introduce a challenging benchmark called BLADE, specifically designed to assess layout comprehension. Extensive experiments on both established and BLADE benchmarks confirm the efficacy of GPE in significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in document understanding. Our code is available at https://github.com/antgroup/GroupPositionEmbedding.git