Collapse, Not Complexity: Failure-Conditioned Decomposition Repair for End-to-End Document Parsing

Abstract:End-to-end document parsers increasingly offer an optional reasoning mode for complex pages. On a 180-page entropy-stratified discovery sample with one frozen 4B checkpoint, complexity is the wrong decision variable. Reasoning lowers mean quality by 2.21 Overall at 1.54x tokens; a preregistered input-only model cannot predict its signed benefit (held-out AUROC 0.47, indistinguishable from chance). The benefit concentrates on pages whose ordinary pass has already collapsed, and they do not look complex: shared collapses have lower layout entropy than healthy ones yet consume 19x the tokens as degenerate repetition that doubling the budget does not cure. Switching modes rarely repairs them: 83% recur under reasoning. We instead detect collapse from the ordinary-pass trace, decompose the page by projection, and re-parse each region. Repair gains 1.40 Overall (95% CI [0.68, 2.16]) at 1.13x tokens, replicates across three checkpoints, and, with all parameters frozen, gains 2.41 (CI [1.64, 3.46]) on the remaining 1,175 benchmark pages.

5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to ICASSP 2027

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.23592 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.23592v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.23592 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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