# Hierarchical Modeling Approach to Fast and Accurate Table Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21083 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21083/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [Image-based table recognition: data, model, and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10683/) (2019)
- [Global Table Extractor (GTE): A Framework for Joint Table Identification and Cell Structure Recognition Using Visual Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00589/) (2020)
- [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)
- [SVTR: Scene Text Recognition with a Single Visual Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00159/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Split, embed and merge: An accurate table structure recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05214/) (2021)
- [Improving Table Structure Recognition with Visual-Alignment Sequential Coordinate Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06949/) (2023)
- [PingAn-VCGroup's Solution for ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Literature Parsing Task B: Table Recognition to HTML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01848/) (2021)
- [Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition with Bidirectionally Trained Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02412/) (2021)
- [A large-scale dataset for end-to-end table recognition in the wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14884/) (2023)
- [ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Literature Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14616/) (2021)
- [An End-to-End Multi-Task Learning Model for Image-based Table Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08648/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Image-based Table Recognition Using Weakly Supervised Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07641/) (2023)
- [ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Table Image Recognition to LaTeX](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14426/) (2021)
- [Multi-Cell Decoder and Mutual Learning for Table Structure and Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13268/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The extraction and use of diverse knowledge from numerous documents is a pressing challenge in intelligent information retrieval. Documents contain elements that require different recognition methods. Table recognition typically consists of three subtasks, namely table structure, cell position and cell content recognition. Recent models have achieved excellent recognition with a combination of multi-task learning, local attention, and mutual learning. However, their effectiveness has not been fully explained, and they require a long period of time for inference. This paper presents a novel multi-task model that utilizes non-causal attention to capture the entire table structure, and a parallel inference algorithm for faster cell content inference. The superiority is demonstrated both visually and statistically on two large public datasets.
