LLM-Guided Probabilistic Fusion for Label-Efficient Document Layout Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a probabilistic fusion framework that leverages large language model priors to improve semi-supervised document layout analysis, achieving high accuracy with minimal labeled data.

Contribution

It presents a novel fusion method combining visual predictions with LLM-derived structural priors, enhancing semi-supervised detection across different model scales.

Findings

Achieves 88.2 AP with only 5% labels on PubLayNet using a lightweight backbone.

Surpasses standard semi-supervised methods and matches state-of-the-art with pretrained models.

Demonstrates the effectiveness of LLM priors in semantic disambiguation and privacy-preserving deployment.

Abstract

Document layout understanding remains data-intensive despite advances in semi-supervised learning. We present a framework that enhances semi-supervised detection by fusing visual predictions with structural priors from text-pretrained LLMs via principled probabilistic weighting. Given unlabeled documents, an OCR-LLM pipeline infers hierarchical regions which are combined with teacher detector outputs through inverse-variance fusion to generate refined pseudo-labels.Our method demonstrates consistent gains across model scales. With a lightweight SwiftFormer backbone (26M params), we achieve 88.2$\pm$0.3 AP using only 5\% labels on PubLayNet. When applied to document-pretrained LayoutLMv3 (133M params), our fusion framework reaches 89.7$\pm$0.4 AP, surpassing both LayoutLMv3 with standard semi-supervised learning (89.1$\pm$0.4 AP, p=0.02) and matching UDOP~\cite{udop} (89.8 AP) which requires 100M+ pages of multimodal pretraining. This demonstrates that LLM structural priors are complementary to both lightweight and pretrained architectures. Key findings include: (1) learned instance-adaptive gating improves over fixed weights by +0.9 AP with data-dependent PAC bounds correctly predicting convergence; (2) open-source LLMs enable privacy-preserving deployment with minimal loss (Llama-3-70B: 87.1 AP lightweight, 89.4 AP with LayoutLMv3); (3) LLMs provide targeted semantic disambiguation (18.7\% of cases, +3.8 AP gain) beyond simple text heuristics.Total system cost includes \$12 for GPT-4o-mini API or 17 GPU-hours for local Llama-3-70B per 50K pages, amortized across training runs.