# FastTab: A Fast Table Recognizer with a Tiny Recursive Module and 1D Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22422 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22422/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.

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

- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [OCR-free Document Understanding Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15664/) (2021)
- [Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19737/) (2024)
- [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)
- [PubTables-1M: Towards comprehensive table extraction from unstructured documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00061/) (2021)
- [TableFormer: Table Structure Understanding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01017/) (2022)
- [Complicated Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04729/) (2019)
- [OmniParser: A Unified Framework for Text Spotting, Key Information Extraction and Table Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19128/) (2024)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Optimized Table Tokenization for Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03393/) (2023)
- [Neural Collaborative Graph Machines for Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13359/) (2021)
- [TGRNet: A Table Graph Reconstruction Network for Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10598/) (2021)
- [TSRFormer: Table Structure Recognition with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04921/) (2022)
- [TRUST: An Accurate and End-to-End Table structure Recognizer Using Splitting-based Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14687/) (2022)
- [LORE: Logical Location Regression Network for Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03730/) (2023)
- [An End-to-End Multi-Task Learning Model for Image-based Table Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08648/) (2023)
- [GridFormer: Towards Accurate Table Structure Recognition via Grid Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14962/) (2023)
- [UniTabNet: Bridging Vision and Language Models for Enhanced Table Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13148/) (2024)
- [TFLOP: Table Structure Recognition Framework with Layout Pointer Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11800/) (2025)
- [LORE++: Logical Location Regression Network for Table Structure Recognition with Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01522/) (2024)
- [TABLET: Table Structure Recognition using Encoder-only Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07015/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Table structure recognition (TSR) requires both table-level coherence (row/column counts, headers, spanning cells) and precise separator localization. We introduce FastTab, a grid-centric TSR model that avoids autoregressive HTML decoding by combining (i) a lightweight Tiny Recursive Module (TRM) for global reasoning and (ii) axial 1D Transformer encoders that capture long-range dependencies along rows and columns. The model predicts row/column counts, header rows, and separators to construct a grid, then infers rowspan/colspan using ROI-aligned cell features. Across four benchmarks (PubTabNet, FinTabNet, PubTables-1M, and SciTSR), FastTab achieves competitive structure recovery performance while operating at low-latency inference. We further study robustness under pixel-level anonymisation and show an extension to curved separators for camera-captured documents. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/hamdilaziz/FastTab .