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

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.23592v1 Announce Type: cross 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