CommonForms: A Large, Diverse Dataset for Form Field Detection · HackerPapers discussions

CommonForms: A Large, Diverse Dataset for Form Field Detection — HN submission

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 16:31:52 GMT

Show HN: Browser-based PDF form fields detection (YOLO-based)

Hey HN! Last week, Joe Barrow released CommonForms [1], a set of open models for automatically detecting form fields in PDFs. He trained two models, FFDNet-S and FFDNet-L, on a dataset of 55k documents. You can read more about his approach in the arXiv paper [2]. As someone who's been searching for reliable models to auto-detect form fields (one of the last hard problems in PDF form filling), I was seriously impressed by the quality of these models. I wanted to give them the attention and distribution they deserve, so I created a fully browser-based implementation that handles both detection…

26 points; 3 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

CommonForms: A Large, Diverse Dataset for Form Field Detection — mentioned by jbarrow

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 10:40:27 GMT

Training ML models for PDF forms. You can try out what I’ve got so far with this service that automatically detects where fields should go and makes PDFs fillable: https://detect.semanticdocs.org/ Code and models are at: https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms That’s built on a dataset and paper I wrote called CommonForms, where I scraped CommonCrawl for hundreds of thousands of fillable form pages and used that as a training set: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16506 Next step is training and releasing some DETRs, which I think will drive quality even higher. But the ultimate end goal is working…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

CommonForms: A Large, Diverse Dataset for Form Field Detection — mentioned by jbarrow

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 14:31:58 GMT

Existing “auto-fillable” tools are pretty lackluster in my experience. CommonForms is tooling that can automatically detect form fields in PDFs and turn those PDFs into fillable documents. The dataset is ~500k form pages pulled from Common Crawl, which I trained the object detectors on. For being vision only, the results are pretty remarkable! Releasing the dataset, paper, models, and (imo most importantly) simple/convenient tooling to automatically prepare any PDF. Links: Repo: https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16506

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.