Journal of Technology Informatics and Engineering
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2025): AUGUST | JTIE : Journal of Technology Informatics and Engineering

Layout-Aware Progressive PDF Rendering: AI Prioritization of PDF Slices to Reduce Time-to-Functional-First-Frame on FUNSD

Heyu Wang (Computer Science, University of Southern California, CA, USA)
Yuxuan Ren (Chemical Engineering & Data Science, University of Washington, WA, USA)
Xiaohan Chang (Computer Science, University of Connecticut, CT, USA)



Article Info

Publish Date
25 Aug 2025

Abstract

Progressive PDF rendering is attractive because users rarely need every visible pixel at once; they need the semantically useful parts of the current viewport early enough for reading and interaction. This paper studies whether layout-aware AI can prioritize PDF slices more effectively than geometric or density-based heuristics. We reconstruct vector PDFs from official FUNSD form annotations and evaluate a tile scheduler that predicts tile utility from inexpensive layout and preview features before high-resolution rendering begins. The empirical study covers 26 reconstructed documents from the FUNSD test split that were fully processed in the present environment, four viewport scenarios, and measured clip-render timings for all visible tiles. The main configuration uses an 8×10 grid and a random-forest regressor trained with page-level 5-fold GroupKFold, then compares the learned scheduler with row-major visible-first, center-first, ink-density, text-density, a hand-tuned layout heuristic, full-page rendering, and an oracle upper bound. The proposed model reaches TTFF-90 in 14.21 ms, compared with 15.18 ms for the best non-AI heuristic, 20.48 ms for full-page rendering, and 24.09 ms for row-major rendering. It also achieves Utility@20ms of 0.941, AUC@25ms of 0.730, NDCG@10 of 0.963, and Recall@10 of 0.969. The results show that slice rendering is not inherently beneficial: the summed visible-tile cost in the main 8×10 setting is 28.80 ms, which is higher than the full-page cost of 20.48 ms, so scheduling quality determines whether slicing improves or harms TTFF. A coarser 6×8 grid reduces AI TTFF-90 to 10.58 ms, while the densest pages favor a full-page fallback. Paired Wilcoxon signed-rank tests over the page-scenario cases yield p < .001 for TTFF-90 improvements of the proposed model over every non-AI baseline. However, those tests should be interpreted as case-level rather than document-level evidence.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

jtie

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Power Engineering Telecommunication Engineering Computer Engineering Control and Computer Systems Electronics Information technology Informatics Data and Software engineering Biomedical ...