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

Accurate and efficient document layout analysis is critical for modern document parsing systems. However, although the YOLO framework represents a leading paradigm for the real-time detector, its adaptation to heterogeneous documents remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose DocLayout-YOLO, a document-specialized real-time detector that integrates diverse synthetic document pretraining and page-axis context modeling. From the data perspective, we introduce MeshLayout-1M, a synthetic pretraining corpus generated by the proposed Mesh-candidate BestFit algorithm, which provides large-scale and diverse document layouts for pretraining and improves adaptation to heterogeneous document scenarios. From the model perspective, we propose Page-Axis Layout Attention (PALA), which captures long-range dependencies along the horizontal and vertical page axes while remaining computationally efficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DocLayout-YOLO achieves state-of-the-art performance on four heterogeneous document benchmarks, obtaining 72.4%/75.5%/96.0%/73.1% mAP${}_{50:95}$ on D${}^4$LA, M${}^6$Doc, HJDataset, and PRIMA-LAD, respectively. Compared with existing real-time detectors, DocLayout-YOLO establishes a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off in document layout analysis.