Multimodal Approaches for Visually-Rich Document Type Classification: A Comparative Analysis
Researchers conducted a systematic comparison of multimodal document classification approaches, evaluating transformer-based models (LayoutLMv3, Donut) against large language models (Qwen3-VL, Qwen3) on the RVL-CDIP benchmark. The study demonstrates that specialized multimodal transformers outperform LLM-based approaches for visually rich documents, with image data proving more critical than OCR-extracted text.