Hao Liu; Xin Li; Bing Liu; Deqiang Jiang; Yinsong Liu; Bo Ren

Abstract

Recently, table structure recognition has achieved impressive progress with the help of deep graph models. Most of them exploit single visual cues of tabular elements or simply combine visual cues with other modalities via early fusion to reason their graph relationships. However, neither early fusion nor individually reasoning in terms of multiple modalities can be appropriate for all varieties of table structures with great diversity. Instead, different modalities are expected to collaborate with each other in different patterns for different table cases. In the community, the importance of intra-inter modality interactions for table structure reasoning is still unexplored. In this paper, we define it as heterogeneous table structure recognition (Hetero-TSR) problem. With the aim of filling this gap, we present a novel Neural Collaborative Graph Machines (NCGM) equipped with stacked collaborative blocks, which alternatively extracts intra-modality context and models inter-modality interactions in a hierarchical way. It can represent the intra-inter modality relationships of tabular elements more robustly, which significantly improves the recognition performance. We also show that the proposed NCGM can modulate collaborative pattern of different modalities conditioned on the context of intra-modality cues, which is vital for diversified table cases. Experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate our proposed NCGM achieves state-of-the-art performance and beats other contemporary methods by a large margin especially under challenging scenarios.