arXiv:2610.41037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web overlays, such as cookie consent banners, newsletter prompts, and age gates, obstruct automated web crawlers and degrade downstream document representations. While proprietary multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can accurately identify overlays, their latency and inference cost preclude web-scale ingestion. Conversely, lightweight vision models struggle with full-page renderings characterized by extreme vertical aspect ratios, where standard isotropic resizing collapses critical text features and causes false positives. In this work, we present WebOverlay, a high-throughput vision-only detector trained via distillation from a frontier vision-language teacher. We establish a dynamic tiling strategy that partitions extreme aspect-ratio web renders into aspect-preserving patches with spatial overlap, coupled with an aspect-ratio-aware boundary adjudication mechanism to eliminate boundary artifacts. To eliminate cross-modal latency overheads, our student model relies purely on visual cues, bypassing DOM tree parsing. WebOverlay significantly outperforms DOM-based heuristics and achieves competitive precision and recall against heavy proprietary MLLM baselines while delivering multiple orders of magnitude higher throughput and substantially reduced deployment costs.
WebOverlay: High-Throughput Vision-Only Distillation for Extreme Aspect-Ratio Web Overlay Detection
A new arXiv paper (2610.41037v1) presents WebOverlay, a vision-only detector for cookie consent banners, newsletter prompts and age gates that obstruct web crawlers, trained by distillation from a frontier vision-language teacher. WebOverlay uses a dynamic tiling strategy that splits extreme aspect-ratio full-page renders into aspect-preserving, spatially overlapping patches, plus aspect-ratio-aware boundary adjudication to remove boundary artifacts, and relies purely on visual cues without DOM tree parsing. The authors report WebOverlay significantly outperforms DOM-based heuristics and matches heavy proprietary multimodal LLM baselines on precision and recall while delivering multiple orders of magnitude higher throughput and substantially lower deployment costs.
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