FocalOrder: Focal Preference Optimization for Reading Order Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Fuyuan, Yu, Dianyu, Ren, He, Liu, Nayu, Kang, Xiaomian, Qiu, Delai, Zhang, Fa, Zhen, Genpeng, Liu, Shengping, Liang, Jiaen, Huang, Wei, Wang, Yining, Zhu, Junnan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Liu, Fuyuan
Yu, Dianyu
Ren, He
Liu, Nayu
Kang, Xiaomian
Qiu, Delai
Zhang, Fa
Zhen, Genpeng
Liu, Shengping
Liang, Jiaen
Huang, Wei
Wang, Yining
Zhu, Junnan
author_facet Liu, Fuyuan
Yu, Dianyu
Ren, He
Liu, Nayu
Kang, Xiaomian
Qiu, Delai
Zhang, Fa
Zhen, Genpeng
Liu, Shengping
Liang, Jiaen
Huang, Wei
Wang, Yining
Zhu, Junnan
contents Reading order detection is the foundation of document understanding. Most existing methods rely on uniform supervision, implicitly assuming a constant difficulty distribution across layout regions. In this work, we challenge this assumption by revealing a critical flaw: \textbf{Positional Disparity}, a phenomenon where models demonstrate mastery over the deterministic start and end regions but suffer a performance collapse in the complex intermediate sections. This degradation arises because standard training allows the massive volume of easy patterns to drown out the learning signals from difficult layouts. To address this, we propose \textbf{FocalOrder}, a framework driven by \textbf{Focal Preference Optimization (FPO)}. Specifically, FocalOrder employs adaptive difficulty discovery with exponential moving average mechanism to dynamically pinpoint hard-to-learn transitions, while introducing a difficulty-calibrated pairwise ranking objective to enforce global logical consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FocalOrder establishes new state-of-the-art results on OmniDocBench v1.0 and Comp-HRDoc. Our compact model not only outperforms competitive specialized baselines but also significantly surpasses large-scale general VLMs. These results demonstrate that aligning the optimization with intrinsic structural ambiguity of documents is critical for mastering complex document structures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_07483
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FocalOrder: Focal Preference Optimization for Reading Order Detection
Liu, Fuyuan
Yu, Dianyu
Ren, He
Liu, Nayu
Kang, Xiaomian
Qiu, Delai
Zhang, Fa
Zhen, Genpeng
Liu, Shengping
Liang, Jiaen
Huang, Wei
Wang, Yining
Zhu, Junnan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Reading order detection is the foundation of document understanding. Most existing methods rely on uniform supervision, implicitly assuming a constant difficulty distribution across layout regions. In this work, we challenge this assumption by revealing a critical flaw: \textbf{Positional Disparity}, a phenomenon where models demonstrate mastery over the deterministic start and end regions but suffer a performance collapse in the complex intermediate sections. This degradation arises because standard training allows the massive volume of easy patterns to drown out the learning signals from difficult layouts. To address this, we propose \textbf{FocalOrder}, a framework driven by \textbf{Focal Preference Optimization (FPO)}. Specifically, FocalOrder employs adaptive difficulty discovery with exponential moving average mechanism to dynamically pinpoint hard-to-learn transitions, while introducing a difficulty-calibrated pairwise ranking objective to enforce global logical consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FocalOrder establishes new state-of-the-art results on OmniDocBench v1.0 and Comp-HRDoc. Our compact model not only outperforms competitive specialized baselines but also significantly surpasses large-scale general VLMs. These results demonstrate that aligning the optimization with intrinsic structural ambiguity of documents is critical for mastering complex document structures.
title FocalOrder: Focal Preference Optimization for Reading Order Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07483