Demystifying PDF Parsing 05: Unifying Separate Tasks into a Small Model

Mechanics, Code, Insights

This article is the fifth in the series. The previous articles introduced several mainstream solutions for PDF parsing and document intelligence, including:

• Categorizing the main tasks of PDF parsing and providing brief introductions to each.

• Pipeline-based methods.

• OCR-free small model-based methods.

• OCR-free large multimodal model-based methods.

In this article, we explore the latest advancements in this field, with a focus on unifying separate sub-tasks into a small model (less than 1B parameters).

We begin by reviewing the previous content from the series and providing a brief overview of unified small model. Next, we introduce three approaches to achieving unification. Finally, we share insights and key takeaways.