6th IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School. Next-Gen Document Understanding: RAG, VLMs, and Structured Knowledge Extraction

From May 25th to 29th, the 6th IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School. Next-Gen Document Understanding: RAG, VLMs, and Structured Knowledge Extraction) took place in Vall de Núria, Catalonia, bringing together PhD students, researchers, and professionals working in document analysis.

Hosted by the Computer Vision Center, the event followed a Challenge-Based Learning framework, where participants progressed from foundational lectures to hands-on practice sessions and culminated in solving real-world industry challenges in collaborative teams. 

Throughout the week, participants attended lectures and practical sessions covering topics such as trustworthy document analysis, vision-language models, historical archives, graph neural networks, information retrieval, and agentic AI systems. 

The program included lectures by Maura Pintor, Marcelo Sanchez, Joana M. Pujades, Gerard Corbella, Silvia Cascianelli, Andreas Fischer, Richard Zanibbi, and Antonio Fabregat. 

One of the central activities of the summer school was the Open Lab Challenge, where teams of four or five participants worked on a diverse set of applications focused on document analysis, including graph-based and handwritten text analysis applications. 

In addition to the academic activities, the event also included student presentations, poster sessions, networking activities, and a fun hike through the valley. 

The Summer School was held in Vall de Núria, a stunning glacial valley nestled in the heart of the Pyrenees mountains of Catalonia, at approximately 2,000 meters elevation. Accessible only by scenic cogwheel train, offering a peaceful and inspiring environment away from everyday distractions.

SSDA 2026 created a space for exchange between researchers and participants from different backgrounds, combining learning, experimentation, and collaboration around current challenges in document analysis. 

A special mention to the co-organizer IARP, and the supporters ELLIOT and ELLIS BCN, for contributing and making this event possible. 

Special thanks also to Adri Molina, Artemis Llabrés, Josep Lladós, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Ernest Valveny, Núria Martínez, Mireia Martín, and Aurora García for their support.