Towards Self-Explainable Document Visual Question Answering with Chain-of-Explanation Predictions

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06058v1
• Date: Thu, 07 May 2026 11:42:23 GMT
• Title: Towards Self-Explainable Document Visual Question Answering with Chain-of-Explanation Predictions
• Abstract summary: Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) requires vision-language models to reason not only about what information in a document is relevant to a question, but also where the answer is grounded on the page.<n>We propose CoExVQA, a self-explainable DocVQA framework with a grounded reasoning process through a chain-of-explanation design.
• Score: 4.292522199527656
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) requires vision-language models to reason not only about what information in a document is relevant to a question, but also where the answer is grounded on the page. Existing DocVQA models entangle question-relevant evidence and answer localization and operate largely as black boxes, offering limited means to verify how predictions depend on visual evidence. We propose CoExVQA, a self-explainable DocVQA framework with a grounded reasoning process through a chain-of-explanation design. CoExVQA first identifies question-relevant evidence, then explicitly localizes the answer region, and finally decodes the answer exclusively from the grounded region. Prediction via CoExVQA's chain-of-explanation enables direct inspection and verification of the reasoning process across modalities. Empirical results show that restricting decoding to grounded evidence achieves SotA explainable DocVQA performance on PFL-DocVQA, improving ANLS by 12% over the current explainable baselines while providing transparent and verifiable predictions.

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