Layout-Guided Masking for GROBID: Lightweight Structural Gains in Large-Scale Scientific PDF Ingestion

Transforming scholarly PDFs into machine-readable fulltext remains a bottleneck for large-scale information systems. Recent vision-based parsers improve accuracy, but need GPUs and may introduce noise into the extracted text. GROBID, a modular font-stream parser running on CPU, is the de-facto standard for structuring scientific articles and underpins several of the largest open scholarly corpora. We pair it with a lightweight CPU detector localising figure, table, and paratext (header, footer, page number) regions, encoded as typed-area masks whose tokens are routed to GROBID's specialised models or discarded. On two PMC corpora, Bioinformatics (1,926 articles) and Materials Science (2,595), scored against JATS with a section-aware structural protocol, our extension improves over plain GROBID on most metrics (NS +0.025/+0.013; +0.086 paragraph recall on Materials Science, dz=1.08), and caption-linked figure recovery improves on both corpora. On the external Table-BRGM benchmark, table detection recovers F1 0.16 → 0.94 and table structure follows (GriTS-Top 0.27 → 0.78, below the strongest GPU system). On body text, against four vision-based systems (Docling, MinerU, olmOCR, dots.ocr), it has the best paragraph precision on both corpora, the best section detection on Materials Science, and a character error rate within 0.004 of the best GPU parser. End-to-end on CPU, it costs 2.7--3.2× less than the cheapest GPU system (Docling) and 10--14× less than generative parsers.