# Grab What You Need: Rethinking Complex Table Structure Recognition with Flexible Components Deliberation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09174/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Pix2seq: A Language Modeling Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10852/) (2021)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01541/) (2016)
- [Image-based table recognition: data, model, and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10683/) (2019)
- [ABCNet: Real-time Scene Text Spotting with Adaptive Bezier-Curve Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10200/) (2020)
- [Global Table Extractor (GTE): A Framework for Joint Table Identification and Cell Structure Recognition Using Visual Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00589/) (2020)
- [PubTables-1M: Towards comprehensive table extraction from unstructured documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00061/) (2021)
- [TableBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Table Detection and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01949/) (2019)
- [TableFormer: Table Structure Understanding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01017/) (2022)
- [Complicated Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04729/) (2019)
- [TableNet: Deep Learning model for end-to-end Table detection and Tabular data extraction from Scanned Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01469/) (2020)
- [Table Structure Recognition using Top-Down and Bottom-Up Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04565/) (2020)
- [LGPMA: Complicated Table Structure Recognition with Local and Global Pyramid Mask Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06224/) (2021)
- [Parsing Table Structures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02199/) (2021)
- [NMS Strikes Back](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06137/) (2022)
- [Neural Collaborative Graph Machines for Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13359/) (2021)
- [Robust Table Detection and Structure Recognition from Heterogeneous Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09056/) (2022)
- [TSRFormer: Table Structure Recognition with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04921/) (2022)
- [Table Structure Extraction with Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02501/) (2020)
- [TRUST: An Accurate and End-to-End Table structure Recognizer Using Splitting-based Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14687/) (2022)
- [Relational Representation Learning in Visually-Rich Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02411/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [TabPedia: Towards Comprehensive Visual Table Understanding with Concept Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01326/) (2024)
- [ST-Raptor: LLM-Powered Semi-Structured Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18190/) (2025)
- [TABLET: Table Structure Recognition using Encoder-only Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07015/) (2025)
- [SepFormer: Coarse-to-fine Separator Regression Network for Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21920/) (2025)
- [TableNet A Large-Scale Table Dataset with LLM-Powered Autonomous](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13041/) (2026)
- [From Diagnosis to Correction: Benchmarking and Improving Real-World Table Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09842/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, Table Structure Recognition (TSR) task, aiming at identifying table structure into machine readable formats, has received increasing interest in the community. While impressive success, most single table component-based methods can not perform well on unregularized table cases distracted by not only complicated inner structure but also exterior capture distortion. In this paper, we raise it as Complex TSR problem, where the performance degeneration of existing methods is attributable to their inefficient component usage and redundant post-processing. To mitigate it, we shift our perspective from table component extraction towards the efficient multiple components leverage, which awaits further exploration in the field. Specifically, we propose a seminal method, termed GrabTab, equipped with newly proposed Component Deliberator. Thanks to its progressive deliberation mechanism, our GrabTab can flexibly accommodate to most complex tables with reasonable components selected but without complicated post-processing involved. Quantitative experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts, especially under more challenging scenes.