I Fine-Tuned YOLO to Understand Document Structure — Here’s How It Works

There’s a class of problem in document AI that sounds deceptively simple: look at a page, figure out what’s on it. Not read the text. Just answer: where is the table? where does the body text start? is that a footnote or a caption? This is document layout detection - and it’s the unsexy foundation underneath every serious document processing pipeline. If you’re building something that ingests PDFs, scanned reports, financial statements, or academic papers, you almost certainly need it. And it’s surprisingly hard to get right with off-the-shelf tools.