GDP.pdf: Benchmarking Grounded Multimodal Reasoning over Professional PDF Documents
arXiv:2607.11192
The paper introduces GDP.pdf, a benchmark of professional PDF documents paired with realistic questions to evaluate grounded multimodal reasoning, and reports that current state‑of‑the‑art models solve only a minority of the 100 items.
Abstract
A large share of day-to-day work in professional domains happens inside PDF files: benefits packets, leases, datasheets, clinical guidelines, construction plans. Benchmarks for document AI have generally measured the required capabilities in isolation: OCR, layout analysis, chart reasoning, table QA, document VQA. A high score on any one of them does not necessarily reveal whether a model can answer a realistic question that someone in the field would actually ask about a specific PDF. GDP_pdf is a benchmark built to measure this directly. It consists of question-document pairs authored by working professionals in ten fields, and a candidate question was kept only when at least two frontier multimodal models failed it in a way that mattered: a wrong answer, missed decisive evidence, or a fabricated claim, rather than a superficial difference such as style. Each item comes with a rubric of atomic criteria, so we can report a graded rubric score as well as a strict task-level pass rate, and each item is tagged against a taxonomy of eleven capabilities in three tiers, spanning text extraction and grounding, table and chart comprehension, cross-referencing, spatial reasoning, and abstention on unsupported queries. We report results for seventeen frontier models on the 100-item benchmark: the best model passes only 30.7% of the items and the worst passes 2%. Most errors trace back to a small set of recurring loss patterns: misaligned tables, misread charts, skipped footnotes and exclusions, miscounted floor-plan symbols, scan noise, and amendments that supersede earlier text.
9 pages. v2: results updated to July 2026 leaderboard (17 models). Accepted at the 2nd Workshop on Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Reasoning (KnowledgeMR) at CVPR 2026 (non-archival), under the former title "PDFParse: A Benchmark for Grounded Multimodal Reasoning over Professional PDF Documents". Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/surgeai/GDP.pdf ; Code: https://github.com/surge-ai/gdp-pdf