Rethinking Detection Based Table Structure Recognition for Visually Rich Document Images
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Table Structure Recognition (TSR) is a widely discussed task aiming at transforming unstructured table images into structured formats, such as HTML sequences, to make text-only models, such as ChatGPT, that can further process these tables. One type of solution is using detection models to detect table components, such as columns and rows, then applying a rule-based post-processing method to convert detection results into HTML sequences. However, existing detection-based models usually cannot perform as well as other types of solutions regarding cell-level TSR metrics, such as TEDS, and the underlying reasons limiting the performance of these models on the TSR task are also not well-explored. Therefore, we revisit existing detection-based models comprehensively and explore the underlying reasons hindering these models' performance, including the improper problem definition, the mismatch issue of detection and TSR metrics, the characteristics of detection models, and the impact of local and long-range features extraction. Based on our analysis and findings, we apply simple methods to tailor a typical two-stage detection model, Cascade R-CNN, for the TSR task. The experimental results show that the tailored Cascade R-CNN based model can improve the base Cascade R-CNN model by 16.35\% on the FinTabNet dataset regarding the structure-only TEDS, outperforming other types of state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating that our findings can be a guideline for improving detection-based TSR models and that a purely detection-based solution is competitive with other types of solutions, such as graph-based and image-to-sequence solutions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".