Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Models for Markdown Conversion of Financial Tables in Malaysian Audited Financial Reports

Accurately extracting and representing the structure of tabular data from financial documents remains a critical challenge in document understanding, particularly for regulatory and analytical use cases. This study addresses the complexity of converting financial tables from Malaysian audited financial reports into Markdown format, a task complicated by rotated layouts, multi-level headers, and implicit structural cues. We propose a fine-tuned vision-language model (VLM), based on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, optimized for high-fidelity Markdown generation from document images. Our approach includes a curated dataset of 2,152 image-text pairs with augmentations and a supervised fine-tuning strategy using LoRA. To assess performance, we evaluated our model on 100 out-of-sample tables using a dual framework: a criteria-based LLM-as-a-judge for fine-grained accuracy and our novel Markdown Tree-Edit-Distance-based Similarity (TEDS) metric for holistic structural fidelity. Our model achieves a 92.20% overall accuracy on the criteria-based assessment and a 96.53% Markdown TEDS score. This performance significantly surpasses its Qwen2.5-VL-7B base model, larger-scale VLMs, and specialized reasoning-enabled models. Compared to these self-hosted alternatives, it also significantly reduces inference time. Furthermore, its accuracy exceeds that of widely used proprietary models such as OpenAI's GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Flash. These results demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning provides an effective and efficient method to bridge the gap between unstructured financial documents and downstream automation, rivalling much larger and more general models without their computational overhead.