OPAD: An Optimized Policy-based Active Learning Framework for Document Content Analysis

TL;DR

OPAD is a reinforcement learning-based active learning framework that optimizes sample selection for complex document content detection tasks, reducing annotation costs and improving performance, especially in weakly labeled scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces OPAD, a novel reinforcement policy for active learning in document content detection, extending to weak labeling and incorporating class imbalance and user feedback rewards.

Findings

OPAD outperforms existing methods in document understanding tasks.

Incorporating user feedback improves annotation efficiency.

OPAD reduces annotation time significantly in experiments.

Abstract

Documents are central to many business systems, and include forms, reports, contracts, invoices or purchase orders. The information in documents is typically in natural language, but can be organized in various layouts and formats. There have been recent spurt of interest in understanding document content with novel deep learning architectures. However, document understanding tasks need dense information annotations, which are costly to scale and generalize. Several active learning techniques have been proposed to reduce the overall budget of annotation while maintaining the performance of the underlying deep learning model. However, most of these techniques work only for classification problems. But content detection is a more complex task, and has been scarcely explored in active learning literature. In this paper, we propose \textit{OPAD}, a novel framework using reinforcement policy for active learning in content detection tasks for documents. The proposed framework learns the acquisition function to decide the samples to be selected while optimizing performance metrics that the tasks typically have. Furthermore, we extend to weak labelling scenarios to further reduce the cost of annotation significantly. We propose novel rewards to account for class imbalance and user feedback in the annotation interface, to improve the active learning method. We show superior performance of the proposed \textit{OPAD} framework for active learning for various tasks related to document understanding like layout parsing, object detection and named entity recognition. Ablation studies for human feedback and class imbalance rewards are presented, along with a comparison of annotation times for different approaches.