DocLayout-YOLO: Axis-Attentive Document Layout Detector with Mesh-Guided Synthetic Pretraining

Accurate document layout analysis remains a critical bottleneck for document parsing systems, due to the intricate coupling among heterogeneous document layout elements, geometric distortions (\eg, paper warping and bending, perspective variations), and reading order within diverse layout structures. Existing approaches typically rely on fragmented multi-stage pipelines or computationally heavy generative Transformer architectures, leading to error propagation and limited efficiency. In this paper, we present RT-DocLayout, a highly efficient end-to-end framework for document layout analysis, designed as a front-end for document parsing tasks. The proposed model unifies classification, detection, pixel-level segmentation, and reading order prediction for layout elements within a single 33M-parameter architecture. Built upon the RT-DETR, our key contribution is a unified multi-task formulation within a single query-based decoder that simultaneously classifies, regresses bounding box, generates masks, and constructs relationship to reason reading order. By jointly learning geometric and structural representations, RT-DocLayout introduces multi-task optimization that substantially improves robustness under real-world document distortions. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in document layout analysis while maintaining real-time inference speed(132.1 FPS). When coupled with downstream OCR engines, RT-DocLayout significantly improves full-document reconstruction quality, providing a scalable and practical foundation for real-world document intelligence systems.

Document layout analysis (DLA) faces a long-standing dilemma: existing methods either capture rich local details at prohibitive computational cost (e.g., Transformer-based approaches with quadratic complexity) or achieve efficient global modeling but sacrifice fine-grained structural awareness (e.g., state-space models). This trade-off hinders deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. We present LayoutMamba, a hybrid framework that synergistically combines sparse-attention Transformers for localized feature extraction (O(n) complexity) and the recurrent state-space mechanism of Mamba for dilution-free long-range dependency modeling across the 2D document canvas. Our two-stage paradigm first uses a lightweight Transformer encoder to hierarchically distill salient local semantics; second, Mamba propagates global contextual dependencies without attention dilution, enabling precise, efficient, and scalable layout understanding. We further identify a critical yet overlooked issue in existing DLA benchmarks: the inherent low-overlap distribution bias of layout objects, which we mitigate through a novel Geometric Overlap Penalty Loss (GOPLoss), a dual-optimization objective that minimizes redundant bounding box overlaps and encourages geometrically consistent predictions. Extensive experiments on PubLayNet and D4LA show that LayoutMamba surpasses state-of-the-art AP on PubLayNet with 8x fewer parameters and maintains leading performance on D4LA, ranking top-3 among published methods, achieving an unprecedented balance between accuracy, efficiency, and scalability. Our work pioneers a cognition-inspired paradigm for document analysis, advancing practical deployment in edge computing and resource-limited environments.

Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is crucial for document artificial intelligence and has recently received increasing attention, resulting in an influx of large-scale public DLA datasets. Existing work often combines data from various domains in recent public DLA datasets to improve the generalization of DLA. However, directly merging these datasets for training often results in suboptimal model performance, as it overlooks the different layout structures inherent to various domains. These variations include different labeling styles, document types, and languages. This paper introduces PromptDLA, a domain-aware Prompter for Document Layout Analysis that effectively leverages descriptive knowledge as cues to integrate domain priors into DLA. The innovative PromptDLA features a unique domain-aware prompter that customizes prompts based on the specific attributes of the data domain. These prompts then serve as cues that direct the DLA toward critical features and structures within the data, enhancing the model's ability to generalize across varied domains. Extensive experiments show that our proposal achieves state-of-the-art performance among DocLayNet, PubLayNet, M6Doc, and D$^4$LA. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zirui00/PromptDLA.