Hey HN! I recently published an article titled "Spatial Text Rendering: Pushing the Limits of Spatial Understanding in LLMs" where I share a technique I've been using for quite some time now to help text-only LLMs process visually complex documents before Vision Language Models (VLMs) became usable. I thought it might be useful for anyone working with document processing!

Summary: This article introduces Spatial Text Rendering (STR), a method that bridges the gap between visually complex documents and text-only LLMs by preserving the crucial spatial information that gives documents their meaning. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) continue to advance, we needed an immediate solution that could handle complex financial documents in the MEA region (but not limited to it), including Arabic text and mixed right-to-left scripts. STR uses image processing techniques to extract the document's underlying structure and render it as spatially-aware text that LLMs can understand.

Key Points and Highlights:

- Financial documents present unique challenges: complex layouts, mixed languages, and data that require absolute precision

- Spatial Text Rendering involves: document preprocessing/deskewing, OCR with spatial coordinates, structure extraction, and structural line detection

- We use a text-based rendering approach that translates visual structure into a format LLMs already understand from their pre-training

- A compaction process significantly reduces token usage while preserving key information

- Testing showed excellent results across multiple LLMs (Claude, GPT-4o, etc.) even without fine-tuning

- The approach offers an immediate solution for document processing while VLMs continue to develop and become more affordable to use

Side Open Discussion: One interesting aspect I've observed is that many LLMs seem to have robust spatial reasoning capabilities from their pre-training alone, despite not being explicitly trained for this task. This suggests that LLMs might have absorbed more spatial understanding through their text-only training than previously thought. I'm curious if others have observed and taken advantage of similar capabilities?

Let me know what you think!