# Recognizing Vector Graphics without Rasterization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03281 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03281/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [DeepGCNs: Can GCNs Go as Deep as CNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03751/) (2019)
- [R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06409/) (2016)
- [Rethinking ImageNet Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08883/) (2018)
- [ABC: A Big CAD Model Dataset For Geometric Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06216/) (2018)
- [Point-GNN: Graph Neural Network for 3D Object Detection in a Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01251/) (2020)
- [A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03477/) (2017)
- [Scaled-YOLOv4: Scaling Cross Stage Partial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08036/) (2020)
- [DeepSVG: A Hierarchical Generative Network for Vector Graphics Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11301/) (2020)
- [Im2Vec: Synthesizing Vector Graphics without Vector Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02798/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Empowering LLMs to Understand and Generate Complex Vector Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11102/) (2024)
- [Symbol as Points: Panoptic Symbol Spotting via Point-based Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10556/) (2024)
- [SymPoint Revolutionized: Boosting Panoptic Symbol Spotting with Layer Feature Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01928/) (2024)
- [CADSpotting: Robust Panoptic Symbol Spotting on Large-Scale CAD Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07377/) (2024)
- [Point or Line? Using Line-based Representation for Panoptic Symbol Spotting in CAD Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23395/) (2025)
- [RendNet: Unified 2D/3D Recognizer With Latent Space Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10066/) (2022)
- [VGBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Vector Graphics Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10972/) (2024)
- [From Fragment to One Piece: A Survey on AI-Driven Graphic Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18641/) (2025)
- [SAR2Struct: Extracting 3D Semantic Structural Representation of Aircraft Targets from Single-View SAR Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06757/) (2025)
- [Text-Aided Multi-Modal Panoptic Symbol Spotting for CAD Floor Plan Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12678/) (2026)
- [PolarSym: Polar Geometry-aware Attention for CAD Floorplan Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11793/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we consider a different data format for images: vector graphics. In contrast to raster graphics which are widely used in image recognition, vector graphics can be scaled up or down into any resolution without aliasing or information loss, due to the analytic representation of the primitives in the document. Furthermore, vector graphics are able to give extra structural information on how low-level elements group together to form high level shapes or structures. These merits of graphic vectors have not been fully leveraged in existing methods. To explore this data format, we target on the fundamental recognition tasks: object localization and classification. We propose an efficient CNN-free pipeline that does not render the graphic into pixels (i.e. rasterization), and takes textual document of the vector graphics as input, called YOLaT (You Only Look at Text). YOLaT builds multi-graphs to model the structural and spatial information in vector graphics, and a dual-stream graph neural network is proposed to detect objects from the graph. Our experiments show that by directly operating on vector graphics, YOLaT out-performs raster-graphic based object detection baselines in terms of both average precision and efficiency.