DocAgent: an Agentic Framework for Multi-Modal Long-Context Document Understanding

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant promise in document understanding and question-answering. Despite the progress, existing approaches can only process short documents due to limited context length or fail to fully leverage multi-modal information. In this work, we introduce DocAgent, a multi-agent framework for long-context document understanding that imitates human reading practice. Specifically, we first extract a structured, tree-formatted outline from documents to help agents identify relevant sections efficiently. Further, we develop an interactive reading interface that enables agents to query and retrieve various types of content dynamically. To ensure answer reliability, we introduce a reviewer agent that cross-checks responses using complementary sources and maintains a task-agnostic memory bank to facilitate knowledge sharing across tasks. We evaluate our method on two long-context document understanding benchmarks, where it bridges the gap to human-level performance by surpassing competitive baselines, while maintaining a short context length. Our code is available at https://github.com/lisun-ai/DocAgent.