AutoFormBench: Benchmark Dataset for Automating Form Understanding

Automated processing of structured documents such as government forms, healthcare records, and enterprise invoices remains a persistent challenge due to the high degree of layout variability encountered in real-world settings. This paper introduces AutoFormBench, a benchmark dataset of 407 annotated real-world forms spanning government, healthcare, and enterprise domains, designed to train and evaluate form element detection models. We present a systematic comparison of classical OpenCV approaches and four YOLO architectures (YOLOv8, YOLOv11, YOLOv26-s, and YOLOv26-l) for localizing and classifying fillable form elements. specifically checkboxes, input lines, and text boxes across diverse PDF document types. YOLOv11 demonstrates consistently superior performance in both F1 score and Jaccard accuracy across all element classes and tolerance levels.