Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Table Only Extraction Mode on Large Financial Statement
In this video I test Sparrow table only extraction mode on a large financial statement table. I use a 6 month property management sample data, with 51 rows and 7 columns, including section headers, blank spacer rows and multiple levels of subtotals.
Table only mode uses dots.ocr for table structure detection, combined with Sparrow custom processing logic on top, to produce a JSON array, with column headers mapped as keys. Section headers like INCOME and OPERATING EXPENSES are extracted too, with empty values, this way row order and table structure stay intact.
I go through the extraction result and compare it against the source table.
Monday, August 10, 2026
Bigger Isn't Always Better: Gemma 31B vs Ministral 14B on a Pivot Table
More parameters doesn't automatically mean better extraction.
Same insurance pivot table as the last video, same generic "*" query, no schema, but this time run through Sparrow's Advanced mode, backed by Gemma 4 31B Dense, instead of Standard mode Ministral 14B.
Result: Gemma 4 31B, despite being over twice the size, was less accurate on this pivot table than Ministral 14B was. It hallucinated on column values — assigning null to cells that had real values, then shifting the actual value into the next column instead. A column-alignment failure Ministral 14B didn't have.
The takeaway: model size isn't a proxy for fit. Structured extraction on dense tabular layouts seems to favor whatever model was better tuned for structure-following, not the model with more parameters. Worth testing both tiers against your actual documents before assuming "Advanced" means "more accurate."
Wednesday, August 5, 2026
Can an LLM Read a Pivot Table? Sparrow + Ministral 14B
Pivot tables are a genuinely hard case for LLM-based extraction — row/column headers, merged cells, and aggregated values instead of a flat list. In this video I test whether Ministral 14B, running in Sparrow's Standard tier, can handle one.
The document: an insurance pivot table. The query: a generic "*", no predefined schema. Sparrow's UI (sparrow.katanaml.io/process) sends it to Ministral 14B running locally via MLX-VLM, which has to infer the structure itself and return clean, structured JSON.
No schema tuning, no hints file — just upload and extract.
Built with Sparrow — open-source document intelligence platform.
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Sparrow Standard Mode: Document Extraction with Ministral 14B
A look at Sparrow's Standard tier, powered by Ministral 3 14B via MLX-VLM.
In this video I run a document through Sparrow's UI (sparrow.katanaml.io/process) using the Standard model — Ministral 14B. It extracts structured line-item data into clean, valid JSON in about 22 seconds, no schema drift, no formatting issues.
Ministral 14B is the default model behind Sparrow's Standard tier — built for fast, everyday document extraction with strong accuracy, running fully local with no cloud dependencies.
Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Mistral OCR 4 + Sparrow: Document to JSON
Follow-up to the Mistral OCR + Sparrow integration video. Mistral released OCR 4 — the latest model with improved accuracy, native bounding box extraction, and structural block labels. One model string change in Sparrow to pick it up.
In this video, extracting a long financial statement table into structured JSON using Mistral OCR 4 + Mistral Small 4.
Sparrow is open source and local-first by design — documents never leave your infrastructure unless you choose the cloud backend.
Monday, June 29, 2026
Building an AI Agent That Searches the Web and Makes Investment Decisions
In this video I build a local agentic AI pipeline that analyzes a bond portfolio and makes sell/hold decisions based on risk analysis and live web search data.
The agent runs four steps: load portfolio positions from JSON, classify each position as low/medium/high risk, search the web per position via Tavily API for historical performance and current outlook, then make a final sell/hold decision with reasoning — all powered by Gemma 4 31B running locally on Apple Silicon via mlx-vlm. No data leaves your machine.
All steps orchestrated with Prefect.
🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/katanaml/sparrow
🌐 Live: https://sparrow.katanaml.io
📧 Enterprise inquiries: abaranovskis@redsamuraiconsulting.com
Labels:
Agentic AI,
Sparrow
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Mistral OCR + Sparrow: Document to JSON
Integrated Mistral OCR as a new cloud inference backend into Sparrow, an open-source document extraction platform. This gives Sparrow a full cloud option alongside its existing local backends (MLX, vLLM), so users without GPU infrastructure can still run enterprise-grade document extraction.
Pipeline: Mistral OCR converts the document to structured HTML, then Mistral Small extracts and transforms the data into JSON based on a defined schema with field-level hints.
In this video, extracting a bonds portfolio table with hint-driven rules:
Sparrow is open source and local-first by design — documents never leave your infrastructure unless you choose the cloud backend.
⭐ GitHub: github.com/katanaml/sparrow
🌐 Live demo: sparrow.katanaml.io
Pipeline: Mistral OCR converts the document to structured HTML, then Mistral Small extracts and transforms the data into JSON based on a defined schema with field-level hints.
In this video, extracting a bonds portfolio table with hint-driven rules:
- Instrument name normalization (extracting issuer brand from full fund names)
- European number formatting (period as thousands separator, comma as decimal)
- Percentage formatting with sign preservation
- Derived risk classification computed from profit/loss percentage
Sparrow is open source and local-first by design — documents never leave your infrastructure unless you choose the cloud backend.
⭐ GitHub: github.com/katanaml/sparrow
🌐 Live demo: sparrow.katanaml.io
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