UniTable: Towards a Unified Framework for Table Recognition via Self-Supervised Pretraining

ShengYun Peng, Aishwarya Chakravarthy, Seongmin Lee, Xiaojing Wang, Rajarajeswari Balasubramaniyan, Duen Horng Chau

Keywords: document and table understanding, table structure recognition, unified training framework, self-supervised pretraining

TL;DR: Tables convey data with implicit conventions created by humans that are challenging for machines to parse. We present UniTable, a training framework that unifies both the training paradigm and training objective of table recognition.

Abstract: Tables convey factual and quantitative data with implicit conventions created by humans that are often challenging for machines to parse. Prior work on table recognition (TR) has mainly centered around complex task-specific combinations of available inputs and tools. We present UniTable, a training framework that unifies both the training paradigm and training objective of TR. Its training paradigm combines the simplicity of purely pixel-level inputs with the effectiveness and scalability empowered by self-supervised pretraining from diverse unannotated tabular images. Our framework unifies the training objectives of all three TR tasks — extracting table structure, cell content, and cell bounding box — into a unified task-agnostic training objective: language modeling. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses highlight UniTable’s state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four of the largest TR datasets. UniTable's table parsing capability has surpassed both existing TR methods and general large vision-language models, e.g., GPT-4o, GPT-4-turbo with vision, and LLaVA. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/poloclub/unitable, featuring a Jupyter Notebook that includes the complete inference pipeline, fine-tuned across multiple TR datasets, supporting all three TR tasks.

Submission Number: 7