# Robust Table Structure Recognition with Dynamic Queries Enhanced Detection Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11615 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11615/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [Image-based table recognition: data, model, and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10683/) (2019)
- [Spatial As Deep: Spatial CNN for Traffic Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06080/) (2017)
- [Fast Convergence of DETR with Spatially Modulated Co-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07448/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Transformer-based Set Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10881/) (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)
- [Efficient DETR: Improving End-to-End Object Detector with Dense Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01318/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CascadeTabNet: An approach for end to end table detection and structure recognition from image-based documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12629/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Split, embed and merge: An accurate table structure recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05214/) (2021)
- [Visual Relationship Detection Using Part-and-Sum Transformers with Composite Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02170/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Document Parsing Unveiled: Techniques, Challenges, and Prospects for Structured Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21169/) (2024)
- [DLAFormer: An End-to-End Transformer For Document Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11757/) (2024)
- [UniTabNet: Bridging Vision and Language Models for Enhanced Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13148/) (2024)
- [SEMv3: A Fast and Robust Approach to Table Separation Line Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11862/) (2024)
- [SPRINT: Script-agnostic Structure Recognition in Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11932/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Distillation via Query Selection for Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06443/) (2024)
- [TABLET: Table Structure Recognition using Encoder-only Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07015/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Detection Based Table Structure Recognition for Visually Rich Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00699/) (2023)
- [TDATR: Improving End-to-End Table Recognition via Table Detail-Aware Learning and Cell-Level Visual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22819/) (2026)
- [SepFormer: Coarse-to-fine Separator Regression Network for Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21920/) (2025)
- [Rethinking the Pointer Loss in Table Structure Recognition: Geometry-Aware Pointer Loss for Spatial Locality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18721/) (2026)
- [From Diagnosis to Correction: Benchmarking and Improving Real-World Table Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09842/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a new table structure recognition (TSR) approach, called TSRFormer, to robustly recognizing the structures of complex tables with geometrical distortions from various table images. Unlike previous methods, we formulate table separation line prediction as a line regression problem instead of an image segmentation problem and propose a new two-stage dynamic queries enhanced DETR based separation line regression approach, named DQ-DETR, to predict separation lines from table images directly. Compared to Vallina DETR, we propose three improvements in DQ-DETR to make the two-stage DETR framework work efficiently and effectively for the separation line prediction task: 1) A new query design, named Dynamic Query, to decouple single line query into separable point queries which could intuitively improve the localization accuracy for regression tasks; 2) A dynamic queries based progressive line regression approach to progressively regressing points on the line which further enhances localization accuracy for distorted tables; 3) A prior-enhanced matching strategy to solve the slow convergence issue of DETR. After separation line prediction, a simple relation network based cell merging module is used to recover spanning cells. With these new techniques, our TSRFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets, including SciTSR, PubTabNet, WTW and FinTabNet. Furthermore, we have validated the robustness and high localization accuracy of our approach to tables with complex structures, borderless cells, large blank spaces, empty or spanning cells as well as distorted or even curved shapes on a more challenging real-world in-house dataset.