DeepSeek OCR | Hacker News Reader

DeepSeek OCR

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1,003 pointspierre244 comments

The paper is more interesting than just another VLM for OCR, they start talking about compression and stuff. E.g. there is this quote

>Our work represents an initial exploration into the boundaries of vision-text compression, investigating how many vision tokens are required to decode text tokens. The preliminary results are encouraging: DeepSeek-OCR achieves near-lossless OCR compression at approximately 10× ratios, while 20× compression still retains 60% accuracy.

(I guess you could say a picture token is worth 10 textual tokens...)

Could someone explain to a noob what the information-theoretic intuition is here? Why does this work, is it that text tokens are still too "granular"/repetitive and don't come close to the ideal entropy coding? Or is switching to vision tokens escaping the limitation of working "one word-ish at a time", allowing you to get closer to entropy (similar to the way that arithmetic encoding does compared to huffman codes)?

And then they start talking about handling long-context by literally(?) downscaling images, forming a correspondence between information loss in the textual domain and the image domain.

LLMs are compute heavy with quadratic scaling (in compute) per tokens. They are trying to compress text tokens into visual tokens with their VLM.

Maybe they would render texts to an image before tokenizing to reduce the compute cost.

But naively wouldn't you expect the representation of a piece of text in terms of vision tokens to be roughly the same number of bits (or more) than the representation as textual token? You're changing representation sure, but that by itself doesn't give you any compute advantages unless there is some sparsity/compressability you can take advantage of in the domain you transform to right?

So I guess my question is where is the juice being squeezed from, why does the vision token representation end up being more efficient than text tokens.

Vision tokens are a good compression medium because with one vision token you have one vector of N elements, but with textual tokens you have M vectors of N elements, because one vision token represent multiple pixels (and possibly multiple words). This is why its a good compression medium for compute.

It will never be as precise as textual tokens but it can be really good as they show in the paper.

>with one vision token you have one vector of N elements, but with textual tokens you have M vectors of N elements

Each vision token represents a 16x16 patch, but to fully cover a word you might need multiple vision tokens. So assuming that the embedding size of the vision token and text token is the same `d` (which I think has to be the case for multimodal models), then wouldn't the fair comparison be `x * d` elements for a sentence in terms of vision tokens, and `y * d` for the same sentence in terms of text tokens? I don't see how you could see a priori that x << y (especially by a factor of 10 as quoted in the paper).

That said, if I do experimentally try this by shrinking this very comment down to the smallest font size I can read it at, then seeing how many 16x16 tokens it takes, you can fit more text than I expected in each "vision token". So I can maybe buy that x is at least not greater than y. But it can't be as simple as "each vision token can cover more text", since that only enables better compression if the encoder can actually uncover some sort of redundancy within each token. (And presumably the type of redundancy it uncovers probably isn't something that "classical" compression techniques can exploit, otherwise it seems like it would have been tried by now?).

You should read the 6th page of the paper (and page 5 for architecture breakdown), they show that they are compressing the vision tokens with convolution to keep a strong semantic understanding and keep a small amount of tokens.

But I think it's still experimentall.

I wonder if text written using chinese characters is more compatible with such vision centric compression than latin text.

I think it's not the case. Chinese characters have the highest information entropy of all writing systems. However, Chinese characters are all independent symbols, which means if you want the LLM to support 5000 Chinese characters, you need to put 5000 characters into the lookup table (obviously there's no root, prefix, and suffix in Chinese, you cannot split the character into multiple reusable word pieces). As a result, you may need fewer characters to represent the same meaning compared to latin languages, but LLMs may also need to activate more token embeddings.

Vision is how humans see text. So text must have built in adaptations to protect from visual noise. For example, two words that look similar must never appear in similar contexts, or else they would be conflated. Hence we can safely reduce such words to the same token. Or something like that.

Is that really factual/true?

Lots of words have multiple meanings and can mean different things even if used in the same sentence/context just from the interpretation of the person reading it.

Heck, it'd argue that most (not all) dayjob conflicts are down to such differences in interpretation /miscommunications

That also works purely on text and it's the trick I used in my German speech recognition engine ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12693 ).

"I'm studying at Oxford Univ" has basically no loss in meaning even though "University" was truncated to less than half its characters.

This is like how many CLIs accept the shortest unique version of commands.

just a hunch but like, from something to do with Unicode?

The trick is that the vision tokens are continuous valued vectors, while the text tokens are elements from a small discrete set (which are converted into continuous valued vectors by a lookup table). So, vision tokens can convey significantly more bits per token than text tokens. This allows them to pack the content of multiple text tokens into a single vision token.

Couldn't you do something like add a bidirectional encoder after your embedding look up table to compress your text into some smaller token-count semantic space before feeding your transformer blocks to get a similar effect, then?

Yes, you can get good compression of a long sequence of "base" text tokens into a shorter sequence of "meta" text tokens, where each meta token represents the information from multiple base tokens. But, grouping a fixed number of base tokens into each meta token isn't ideal, since that won't align neatly with sensible semantic boundaries, like words, phrases, sentences, etc. So, the trick is how decide which base tokens should be grouped into each meta token....

This sort of "dynamic chunking" of low-level information, perhaps down to the level of raw bytes, into shorter sequences of meta tokens for input to some big sequence processing model is an active area of research. Eg, one neat paper exploring this direction is: "Dynamic Chunking for End-to-End Hierarchical Sequence Modeling" [1], from one of the main guys behind Mamba and other major advances in state-space models.

[1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07955

A text token generally represents a portion of a single word, while a vision token represents a portion of the entire page, which may include multiple words. This is where the "compression factor" comes from.

The number of bits to represent a text or vision token is the same, since they are both represented as embeddings of a fixed number of dimensions defined by the Transformer (maybe a few thousand for a large SOTA model).

Whether a vision token actually contains enough information to accurately extract (OCR) all the text data from that portion of the image is going to depend on how many pixels that vision token represents and how many words were present in that area of the image. It's just like considering images of the same page of text at different resolutions - a 1024x1024 image vs a 64x64 one, etc. As the resolution decreases so will OCR accuracy. At some point the resolution is insufficient and the words become a blurry mess and OCR accuracy suffers.

This is what DeepSeek are reporting - OCR accuracy if you try to use a single vision token to represent, say, 10 text tokens, vs 20 text tokens. The vision token may have enough resolution to represent 10 tokens well, but not enough for 20.

each text token is often subword unit, but in VLMs the visual tokens are in semantic space. Semantic space obviously compresses much more than subword slices.

disclaimer: not expert, on top of my head

Text tokens are quantized and represent subword units, vision tokens only exist in the embedding space.

The way text tokenization works in LLMs is that you have a "lookup table" of (small) token ids to (large) vector embeddings. To pass text to the LLM, you split it at token boundaries, convert strings to token ids, and then construct the "context", a matrix where each row is a vector taken from that lookup table.

Transmitting text token sequences can be relatively efficient, you just transmit the token IDs themselves[1]. They're small integers (~100k possible token ids is typical for large models). Transmitting the actual embeddings matrix would be far less efficient, as embeddings often consist of thousands of floating point numbers.

Images are encoded differently. After some basic preprocessing, image data is passed straight to a neural- network-based image encoder. That encoder encodes the image into vectors, which are then appended to the context. There are no token ids, there's no lookup table, we go straight from image data to token embeddings.

This means transmitting image tokens cannot be done as efficiently, as you'd have to transmit the embeddings themselves. Even though an image is encoded in fewer tokens, the most efficient representation of those tokens takes more bytes.

You can think of a text token as an integer between 0 and n, which we know how to map to a vector. This means you have `n` possible choices of tokens. In contrast, an image token is an array of m floating point numbers (the vector itself), each of which can take on many possible values. This means the "token space" of vision tokens is actually much larger.

There's also the issue of patterns. Text tokens correspond directly to a contiguous span of UTF-8 bytes, and most tokenizers won't create tokens that span word boundaries. This means they can't encode global patterns efficiently. You can't have a "Hamlet's monologue" or "the text that follows is in Spanish" token.

Great explanation, thanks. I was surprised to hear that models still only work with ~100k tokens, but after giving it some thought it makes sense. There's only so many words/subword units that get used in any given language. The entropy comes from all the billions of different ways those subwords can be ordered.

There is also a tradeoff between different vocabulary sizes (how many entries exist in the token -> embedding lookup table) that inform the current shape of tokenizers and LLMs. (Below is my semi-armchair stance, but you can read more in depth here[0][1].)

If you tokenized at the character level ('a' -> embedding) then your vocabulary size would be small, but you'd have more tokens required to represent most content. (And context scales non-linearly, iirc, like n^3) This would also be a bit more 'fuzzy' in terms of teaching the LLM to understand what a specific token should 'mean'. The letter 'a' appears in a _lot_ of different words, and it's more ambiguous for the LLM.

On the flip side: What if you had one entry in the tokenizer's vocabulary for each word that existed? Well, it'd be far more than the ~100k entries used by popular LLMs, and that has some computational tradeoffs like when you calculate the probability of each 'next' token via softmax, you'd have to run that for each token, as well as increasing the size of certain layers within the LLM (more memory + compute required for each token, basically).

Additionally, you run into a new problem: 'Rare Tokens'. Basically, if you have infinite tokens, you'll run into specific tokens that only appear a handful of times in the training data and the model is never able to fully imbue the tokens with enough meaning for them to _help_ the model during inference. (A specific example being somebody's username on the internet.)

Fun fact: These rare tokens, often called 'Glitch Tokens'[2], have been used for all sorts of shenanigans[3] as humans learn to break these models. (This is my interest in this as somebody who works in AI security)

As LLMs have improved, models have pushed towards the largest vocabulary they can get away with without hurting performance. This is about where my knowledge on the subject ends, but there have been many analyses done to try to compute the optimal vocabulary size. (See the links below)

One area that I have been spending a lot of time thinking about is what Tokenization looks like if we start trying to represent 'higher order' concepts without using human vocabulary for them. One example being: Tokenizing on LLVM bytecode (to represent code more 'densely' than UTF-8) or directly against the final layers of state in a small LLM (trying to use a small LLM to 'grok' the meaning and hoist it into a more dense, almost compressed latent space that the large LLM can understand).

It would be cool if Claude Code, when it's talking to the big, non-local model, was able to make an MCP call to a model running on your laptop to say 'hey, go through all of the code and give me the general vibe of each file, then append those tokens to the conversation'. It'd be a lot fewer tokens than just directly uploading all of the code, and it _feels_ like it would be better than uploading chunks of code based on regex like it does today...

This immediately makes the model's inner state (even more) opaque to outside analysis though. e.g., like why using gRPC as the protocol for your JavaScript front-end sucks: Humans can't debug it anymore without other tooling. JSON is verbose as hell, but it's simple and I can debug my REST API with just network inspector. I don't need access to the underlying Protobuf files to understand what each byte means in my gRPC messages. That's a nice property to have when reviewing my ChatGPT logs too :P

Exciting times!

0: https://www.rohan-paul.com/p/tutorial-balancing-vocabulary-s...

1: https://arxiv.org/html/2407.13623v1

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_token

3: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldm...

Again, super interesting thanks!

> One area that I have been spending a lot of time thinking about is what Tokenization looks like if we start trying to represent 'higher order' concepts without using human vocabulary for them. One example being: Tokenizing on LLVM bytecode (to represent code more 'densely' than UTF-8)

I've had similar ideas in the past. High level languages that humans write are designed for humans. What does an "LLM native" programming language look like? And, to your point about protobufs vs JSON, how does a human debug it when the LLM gets stuck?

> It would be cool if Claude Code, when it's talking to the big, non-local model, was able to make an MCP call to a model running on your laptop to say 'hey, go through all of the code and give me the general vibe of each file, then append those tokens to the conversation'. It'd be a lot fewer tokens than just directly uploading all of the code, and it _feels_ like it would be better than uploading chunks of code based on regex like it does today...

That's basically the strategy for Claude's new "Skills" feature, just in a more dynamic/AI driven way. Claude will do semantic search through YAML frontmatter to determine what skill might be useful in a given context, then load that entire skill file into context to execute it. Your idea here is similar, use a small local model to summarize each file (basically dynamically generate that YAML front matter), feed those into the larger model's context, and then it can choose which file(s) it cares about based on that.

Textual language is really, really amazing if you sit down and think about what it does versus the resources it consumes to do it.

It's a common pasttime for programmers to claim that our textual programming languages are just terrible and need to be replaced somehow with something visual, but I think this very often comes from a place of not understanding just how amazing textual languages are. Not they couldn't possibly be improved by something in at least some domains, and there are after all some successful niches for visual languages, but I think if you set out to wholesale replace textual languages without an understanding of and appreciation for the impressive nature of the competition they offer you're setting yourself up to fail.

This also touches on the contrast between how human beings and LLM's trade compression for nuance. Human beings have enormous resources devoted to long-tailed distribution of information, for example in lexical items. Word distributions follow Zipf's Law, so like in the million word FROWN corpus, roughly half the words only occur one time. Like when's the last time you use the word chrysanthemum, or corpulent? But did you have any difficulty recognizing them? So while human beings have limited scale compared to machines, we do have an enormous capacity for nuanced, communication and conception.

Whereas LLM's make the opposite trade-off. There are information centric theory limitations on the amount of information LM's can store (roughly 3.6 bits per parameter) so they aggressively compress information and trade away nuance (https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17117).

Theres almost an infinity of chess games possible from barely 32 pièces and simple moves.

Already at move 3 you have bilions of positions possible

Actually there are VAEs which use a codebook approach to creating discrete tokens instead of float vectors. There has been some success in that direction in diffusion models for instance.

This is a great summary. If you think about it a bit, text is an expanded representation of concepts meant for display on a two-dimensional surface that can then be read back by human eyes; our brains convert the two-dimensional information into concepts again.

So to me it’s not a surprise that you can transform the two-dimensional representation of the same information into concepts again without losing much.

The paper talks about using this approach to generate large amounts of LLM training data rapidly. That’s intriguing. It suggests that one of the best ways of training models on a wide variety of input data with very long context is to provide it with an image representation instead of text tokens.

Text is actually one-dimensional, writing is two-dimensional.

To a pure LLM, characters 15 and 16 at line 1 are considered adjacent, but there's no relationship between character 15 of line 1 and character 15 of line 2.

A vision model (which considers text as squiggles, not UTF8 codepoints), such a relationship does exist.

Some models use vector quantized variational autoencoders to discretize images into sequences of discrete symbols from a fixed codebook.

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk%3D_572b4955-6265-4210...

So in terms of OCR, does the neural network 'map' the words into an embedding directly, or is it getting a bunch of words like "Hamlet's monologue" and mapping that to an embedding? Basically what I'm asking is if the neural network image encoder is essentially doing OCR 'internally' when it is coming up with the embedding (if that makes any sense).

That's not really true, the latest autoregressive image models create a codebook of patches that are then encoded as tokens and image is assembled out of them.

Thank you, this makes sense! As [1] puts it pithily

>Image-patch tokens make better use of the high-dimensional embedding space than text tokens do.

That seems to imply it's not necessarily something unique about images, just a byproduct of having better conversion from "raw input -> embeddings" [2]. Although there is a certain elegance of handling both images and text with the same method.

[1] https://twitter.com/c0mbinat0r/status/1980698103234891892 [2] https://twitter.com/Kangwook_Lee/status/1980709454522744902

(Just noting that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652952 and the article therein are also worth reading)

I don't know if there is any common practice among multi-modal input "LLM"s as to how they encode image inputs - convert them into "vision tokens", but it's basically going to come down to splitting the image into a grid of regions and encoding those.

I'm not sure there's any information theoretic intuition to be had with DeepSeek's experiments - it seems to be more about what's the lowest resolution image resolution/grid you can get away with and still capture enough image detail to be able to accurately perform OCR on it.

It'd be cool if Karpathy would extend his NanoChat to be multi-modal to spread the knowledge of how this is typically done.

Surely the appropriate ratio depends on the resolution of each character, relative to the size of the vision token patch? That is the only way the number of text tokens needed to describe the output of OCR can be independent of the resolution of the image (as it should).

Exactly right, the OCR isn't the interesting part. 10x context compression is potentially huge. (With caveats, at only ~97% accuracy, so not appropriate for everything.)

I figured out how to get this running on the NVIDIA Spark (ARM64, which makes PyTorch a little bit trickier than usual) by running Claude Code as root in a new Docker container and having it figure it out. Notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/20/deepseek-ocr-claude-co...

Here's a result I got https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/deepseek-ocr-nv... - against this image: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/ft.jpeg

Looks like this did really solid, with the exception of the paragraph directly below the quote. It hallucinated some filler there and bridge it with the next column.

Thanks for running the test quickly!

By my eye it just bridge. I didn't see any filler. It went from "Code is a language" - above the quote and then to "in a garden by name." which was the top of the next column but missing the chicken subject.

> by running Claude Code as root in a new Docker container

How do you get the "as root" part of that to work?

(sorry if it's explained in your article)

Run it on a root account and do:

  IS_SANDBOX=1 claude --dangerously-skip-permissions

Thanks!!

Wow, this deserves its own submission.

It missed the initial "A" in the text which I sort of understand, seems not a lot of news articles were put in the dataset. But more interestingly, it missed the entire "Hallucination is a risk and...", the article "theme" next to the author name also the final email.

The paper makes no mention of Anna’s Archive. I wouldn’t be surprised if DeepSeek took advantage of Anna’s offer granting OCR researchers access to their 7.5 million (350 TB) Chinese non-fiction collection ... which is bigger than Library Genesis.

https://annas-archive.org/blog/duxiu-exclusive.html

hahaha also immediately thought of this, wonder when the ocr'd dataset would be getting released

Yes it means they will never release their dataset :(

Why do they need to grant access for people to use copies of books they don’t own?

Not to rationalize it, but it appears that they're gatekeeping the dataset to get access to the OCR-scans from the people they choose to share it with. This is to improve their existing service by making the content of books (and not just their title/tags) searchable.

As per the blog post: >What does Anna’s Archive get out of it? Full-text search of the books for its users.

Fair enough, it just seems like they're painting an even bigger target on their backs by restricting access to copyrighted material they don't own the rights to

> The books from Duxiu have long been pirated on the Chinese internet. Usually they are being sold for less than a dollar by resellers. They are typically distributed using the Chinese equivalent of Google Drive, which has often been hacked to allow for more storage space

Ownership laundering.

Oh great so now Anna's archive will get taken down as well by another trash LLM provider abusing repositories that students and researchers use, META torrenting 70TB from library genesis wasn't enough

It appears this is an active offer from Anna's archive, so presumably they can handle the load and are able to satisfy the request safely.

Seems like they are doing fine:

https://open-slum.org

Yeah, for now, Meta torrented 70TB and right after that they cut the rope for everyone else, mysteriously their hitman (US govenrment) hit both Libgen and Z-Lib shortly after.

Previous paper from DeepSeek has mentioned Anna’s Archive.

> We cleaned 860K English and 180K Chinese e-books from Anna’s Archive (Anna’s Archive, 2024) alongside millions of K-12 education exam questions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05525 DeepSeek-VL paper

For everyone wondering how good this and other benchmarks are:

- the OmniAI benchmark is bad

- Instead check OmniDocBench[1] out

- Mistral OCR is far far behind most Open Source OCR models and even further behind then Gemini

- End to End OCR is still extremely tricky

- composed pipelines work better (layout detection -> reading order -> OCR every element)

- complex table parsing is still extremely difficult

[1]: https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench

Wish someone benchmarked Apple Vision Framework against these others. It's built into most Apple devices, but people don't know you can actually harness it to do fast, good quality OCR for you (and go a few extra steps to produce searchable pdfs, which is my typical use case). I'm very curious where it would fall in the benchmarks.

It is unusable trash for languages with any vertical writing such as Japanese. It simply doesn’t work.

Yeah, and fails quickly at anything handwritten.

I mostly OCR English, so Japanese (as mentioned by parent) wouldn't be an issue for me, but I do care about handwriting. See, these insights are super helpful. If only there was, say, a benchmark to show these.

My main question really is: what are practical OCR tools that I can string together on my MacBook Pro M1 Max w/ 64GB Ram to maximize OCR quality for lots of mail and schoolwork coming into my house, all mostly in English.

I use ScanSnap Manager with its built in OCR tools, but that's probably super outdated by now. Apple Vision does way better job than that. I heard people say also that Apple Vision is better than Tesseract. But is there something better still that's also practical to run in a scripted environment on my machine?

LiveText too? It has a newer engine

This is the second comment of yours about LiveText (this is the older one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192141) — I found that one by complete coincidence because I'm trying to provide a Ruby API for these frameworks. However, I can't find much info on LiveText? What framework is it part of? Do you have any links or any additional info? I found a source where they say it's specifically for screen and camera capturing.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/visionkit/imageana... VisionKit. Swift-only (as with many new APIs) so lots of people stuck on ObjC bridges simply ignore it.

It does not provide bounding boxes but you can get text.

That's great, I'm going to give this a shot. If you have any more resources please do share. I don't mind Swift-only, because I'm writing little shims with `@_cdecl` for the bridge (don't have much experience here, but hoping this is going to work, leaning on AI for support).

Yeah, if it was cross-platform maybe more people would be curious about it, but something that can only run on ~10% of the hardware people have doesn't make it very attractive to even begin to spend time on Apple-exclusive stuff.

But you can have an apple device deployed in your stack to handle the OCR, right? I get on-device is a hardware limitation for many, but if you have an apple device in your stack, can’t you leverage this?

Yeah, but handling macOS is a infrastructure-capacity sucks, Apple really doesn't want you to so tooling is almost none existing. I've setup CI/CD stacks before that needed macOS builders and it's always the most cumbersome machines to manage as infrastructure.

AWS literally lets you deploy Macs as EC2 instances, which I believe includes all of AWS's usual EBS storage and disk imaging features.

Alright, so now the easy thing is done, now how do you actually manage them, keep them running and do introspection without resorting to SSH or even remote desktop?

How do you manage any EC2 instance “without resorting to SSH”? Even for Linux EC2 instances, the right answer is often tools like Ansible, which do still use SSH under the hood.

You usually provision them via images, that they then either install from or boot from directly. Not to mention there are countless of infrastructure software to run that works for at least Linux, sometimes Windows and seldom even macOS.

I specifically mentioned the imaging capability of EBS for Mac, which you dismissed as the easy part. Now you’re claiming that is the main thing? Well, good news!

And yes, Ansible (among other tools) can be used to manage macOS.

This discussion doesn’t seem productive. You have a preconceived view point, and you’re not actually considering the problem or even doing 5 seconds of googling.

Managing a Mac fleet on AWS isn’t a real problem. If Apple’s OCR framework were significantly above the competition, it could easily be used. I would like to see benchmarks of it, as the other person was also asking for.

10% of hardware is an insanely vast amount, no?

Well, it's 90% less than what everyone else uses, so even if the total number is big, relatively it has a small user-base.

I don’t think 10% of anything would be considered relatively small even if we talk about 10 items: literally there’s only 10 items and this 1 has the rare quality of being among 10. Let alone billions of devices. Unless you want to reduce it to tautology, and instead of answering “why it’s not benchmarked” just go for “10 is smaller than 90, so I’m right”.

My point is, I don’t think any comparative benchmark would ever exclude something based on “oh it’s just 10%, who cares.” I think the issue is more that Apple Vision Framework is not well known as an OCR option, but maybe it’s starting to change.

And another part of the irony is that Apple’s framework probably gets way more real world usage in practice than most of the tools in that benchmark.

The initial wish was that more people cared about Apple Vision Framework, I'm merely claiming that since most people don't actually have Apple hardware, they're avoiding Apple technology as it commonly only runs on Apple hardware.

So I'm not saying it should be excluded because it's can only used by relatively few people, but I was trying to communicate that I kind of get why not so many people care about it and why it gets forgotten, since most people wouldn't be able to run it even if they wanted to.

Instead, something like DeepSeek OCR could be deployed on any of the three major OSes (assuming there is implementations of the architecture available), so of course it gets a lot more attention and will be included in way more benchmarks.

I get what you're saying, I'm just disagreeing with your thought process. By that logic benchmarks would also not include the LLMs that they did, since most people wouldn't be able to run those either (it takes expensive hardware). In fact, more people would probably be able to run Vision framework than those LLMs, for cheaper (Vision is even on iPhones). I'm more inclined to agree if you say "maybe people just don't like Apple". :)

Interesting. How do you harness it for that purpose? I've found apple ocr to be very good.

The short answer is a tool like OwlOCR (which also has CLI support). The long answer is that there are tools on github (I created the stars list: https://github.com/stars/maxim/lists/apple-vision-framework/) that try to use the framework for various things. I’m also trying to build an ffi-based Ruby gem that provides convenient access in Ruby to the framework’s functionality.

Apple shortcuts allows you to use OCR on images you pass into it. Looking for “ Extract Text from Image”

> the OmniAI benchmark is bad

According to Omni OCR benchmark, Omni OCR is the best OCR. I am sure you all will find no issues with these findings.

How does an LLM approach to OCR compare to say Azure AI Document Intelligence (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/document...) or Google's Vision API (https://cloud.google.com/vision?hl=en)?

Not sure why you're being downvoted, I'm also curious.

OmniAI has a benchmark that companies LLMs to cloud OCR services.

https://getomni.ai/blog/ocr-benchmark (Feb 2025)

Please note that LLMs progressed at a rapid pace since Feb. We see much better results with the Qwen3-VL family, particularly Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct for our use-case.

Magistral-Small-2509 is pretty neat as well for its size, has reasoning + multimodality, which helps in some cases where context isn't immediately clear, or there are few missing spots.

Omni OCR team says that according to their own benchmark, the best OCR is the Omni OCR. I am quite surprised.

Classical OCR still probably make undesirable su6stıtutìons in CJK from there being far too many of similar ones, even some absurd ones that are only distinguishable under microscope or by looking at binary representations. LLMs are better constrained to valid sequences of characters, and so they would be more accurate.

Or at least that kind of thing would motivate them to re-implement OCR with LLM.

Huh... Would it work to have some kind of error checking model that corrected common OCR errors? That seems like it should be relatively easy.

It's harder then it first seems. The root problem is that for text like "hallo", correcting to "hello" may be fixing an error or introducing an error. In general, the more aggressive your error correction, the more errors you inadvertently introduce. You can try and make a judgement based on context ("hallo, how are you?"), which certainly helps, but it's only a mitigation. Light error correction is common and effective, but you can't push it to a full solution. The only way to fully solve this problem is to look at the entire document at once so you have maximum context available, and this is what non-traditional OCR attempts to do.

Okay, but there way more common errors that should be easy to fix. "He11o", "Emest Herningway", incorrect diacritics like the other person mentioned, etc.

aren't all of these multimodal LLM approaches, just open vs closed ones

My base expectation is that the proprietary OCR models will continue to win on real-world documents, and my guess is that this is because they have access to a lot of good private training data. These public models are trained on arxiv and e-books and stuff, which doesn't necessarily translate to typical business documents.

As mentioned though, the LLMs are usually better at avoiding character substitutions, but worse at consistency across the entire page. (Just like a non-OCR LLM, they can and will go completely off the rails.)

Not sure about the others but we use Azure AI Document Intelligence and its working well for our resume parsing system. Took a good bit of tuning but we havent had to touch it for almost a year now.

Not sure how it compares but we did some trials with Azure AI Document Intelligence and were very surprised at how good it was. We had a document example which was a poor photograph of a document that had quite a skew, and it (too our surprise), also detected the customer’s human legible signature and extracted their name from that signature.

I haven't fired this up yet to try but I've been evaluating & working with quite a few different VLMs from the small granite, qwen etc models up to the larger VLMs available to see if we can fully replace traditional OCR in our system but I've been disappointed so far - our system takes documents from customers and supplies them back normalized documents (i.e rasterized multi-page bitmaps) marked up as they've requested - however in our use case we need accurate coordinates of data down to the letter/word level and from my experience the positional outputs from these VLMs are either wildly inconsistent, completely hallucinated, or so vague that it doesn't allow us to target anything with any kind of accuracy or granularity.

our solution so far has been to stick to using tesseract with good clean-up routines and then augmenting/fixing-up the output using the VLM OCR text where we don't have structured source document data available

it could be that we just have a very niche use-case and it doesn't matter to most people, I'm sure if you just want a text dump or restructured markdown/html representation of documents these VLMs work well but the number of articles & comments I've seen claiming that these models have 'solved' OCR just seems counter to our experiences

You can train a cnn to find bounding boxes of text first. Then run VLM on each box.

Have you tried moondream yet[1]? The moondream 3 preview model[2], according to the blogpost[3] appears to outperform many frontier models on VLM tasks and does so with a relatively small footprint.

[1] https://moondream.ai/

[2] https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3-preview

[3] https://moondream.ai/blog/moondream-3-preview

Your customers don't have any handwritten text?

My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point.

The OmniAI benchmark that's also referenced here wasn't updated with new models since February 2025. I assume that's because general purpose LLMs have gotten better at OCR than their own OCR product.

I've been able to solve a broad range of OCR tasks by simply sending each page as an image to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and asking it nicely to extract the content in Markdown under some additional formatting instructions. That will cost you around $0.20 for 1000 pages in batch mode and the results have been great.

I'd be interested to hear where OCR still struggles today.

> My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point.

Not really in practice to me. Especially they still struggle with Table format detection.

This.

Any complex parent table span cell relationship still has low accuracy.

Try the reverse, take a complex picture table and ask Chatgpt5, claude Opus 3.1, Gemini Pro 2.5 to produce a HTML table.

They will fail.

Maybe I misunderstood the assignment but it seems to work for me.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68f5f9ba-d448-8005-86d2-c3fbae028b...

Edit: Just caught a mistake, transcribed one of the prices incorrectly.

Right, I wouldn't use full table detection to VLM model because they tend to mistake with numbers in table...

Maybe my imagination is limited or our documents aren't complex enough, but are we talking about realistic written documents? I'm sure you can take a screenshot of a very complex spreadsheet and it fails, but in that case you already have the data in structured form anyway, no?

> realistic written documents?

Just get a DEF 14A (Annual meeting) filing of a company from SEC EDGAR.

I have seen so many mistakes when looking at the result closely.

Here is a DEF 14A filing from Salseforce. You can print it to a PDF and then try converting.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1108524/000110852425...

Historical filings are still a problem, but hasn’t the SEC required filing in an XML format since the end of 2024?

It's not really about SEC filings, though. While we folks on HN would never think of hard copies of invoices, but much of the world still operates this way.

As mentioned above I have about 200 construction invoices. They are all formatted in a way that doesn't make sense. Most fail both OCR and OpenAI

OpenAI has unusuably low image DPI. Try Gemini.

Now if someone mails or faxes you that spreadsheet? You're screwed.

Spreadsheets are not the biggest problem though, as they have a reliable 2-dimensional grid - at worst some cells will be combined. The form layouts and n-dimensional table structures you can find on medical and insurance documents are truly unhinged. I've seen documents that I struggled to interpret.

To be fair, this is problematic for humans too. My old insurer outright rejected things like that stating it's not legible.

(I imagine it also had the benefit of reducing fraud/errors).

In this day and age, it's probably easier/better to change the process around that as there's little excuse for such shit quality input. I understand this isn't always possible though.

I had mentioned this when the new QWEN model dropped - I have a stack of construction invoices that fail through both OCR and OpenAI.

It's a hard (and very interesting) problem space.

Technically not OCR, but HTR (hand-written text/transcript recognition) is still difficult. LLMs have increased accuracy, but their mistakes are very hard to identify because they just 'hallucinate' text they cannot digitize.

Interesting - have you tried sending the image and 'hallucinated' text together to a review LLM to fix mistakes?

I don't have a use case of 100s or 1000s of hand-written notes have to be transcribed. I have only done this with whiteboard discussion snapshots and it has worked really well.

Often, the review LLM will also say everything is okay when it’s made up too.

This. I am reading old vital records in my family genealogy quest, and as those are sometimes really difficult to read, I turned to LLMs, hearing they are great in OCR. It’s been… terrible. The LLM will transcribe the record without problems, the output seems completely correct, a typical text of a vital record. Just… the transcribed text has nothing to do with my specific record. On the other hand, transkribus.eu has been fairly usable for old vital record transcription – even though the transcribed text is far from perfect, many letters and words are recognized incorrectly, it helps me a lot with the more difficult records.

We ran a small experiment internally on this and it looked like Gemini is better at handwriting recognition than I am. After seeing what it parsed, I was like "oh yeah, that's right". I do agree that instead of saying "Sorry, I can't read that" it just made up something.

I have a thought that whilst LLM providers can say "Sorry" - there is little incentive and it will expose the reality that they are not very accurate, nor can be properly measured. That said, there clearly are use cases where if the LLM can't a certain level of confidence it should refer to the user, rather than guessing.

This is actively being worked on my pretty much every major provider. It was the subject of that recent OpenAI paper on hallucinations. It's mostly caused by benchmarks that reward correct answers, but don't penalize bad answers more than simply not answering.

E.g.

Most current benchmarks have a scoring scheme of

1 - Correct Answer 0 - No answer or incorrect answer

But what they need is something more like

1 - Correct Answer 0.25 - No answer 0 - Incorrect answer

You need benchmarks (particularly those used in training) to incentivize the models to acknowledge when they're uncertain.

If you can accept that the machine just make up what it doesn't recognize instead of saying "I don't know," then yes it's solved.

(I'm not being snarky. It's acceptable in some cases.)

But this was very much the case with existing OCR software as well? I guess the LLMs will end up making up plausible looking text instead of text riddled with errors, which makes it much harder to catch the mistakes, in fairness

Good libraries gave results with embedded confidence levels for each unit recognized.

Existing ocr doesn’t skip over entire (legible) paragraphs or hallucinate entire sentences

rarely happens to me using LLMs to transcribe pdfs

I usually run the image(s) through more than one converter then compare the results. They all have problems, but the parts they agree on are usually correct.

This must be some older/smaller model.

Just checked it with Gemini 2.5 Flash. Instructing it to mark low-confidence words seems to work OK(ish).

Do any LLM OCRs give bounding boxes anyway? Per character and per block.

Gemini does but it's not as good as Google vision, and the format it's différent Here it's the documentation https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/boundi...

Also Simon Willison Made a blog post that might be helpful https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/26/gemini-bounding-box-vi...

I hope that this capability improves so I can use only Gemini API.

Try MinerU 2.5 with two-step parsing. It gives good results with bounding boxes per block. Not sure if you can get it to do more detailed such as word or character level.

These days it does just that, it'll say null or whatever if you give it the option. When it does make it up, it tends to be limitation of the image qualify ( max dpi).

Blotchy text and specific typeface make 6's look like 8's, even to the non-discerning eye, a human would think it's an 8, zoom in and see it's a 6.

Google's image quality on uploads is still streets ahead of openai for instance btw.

No way it's solved. try to make OCR over a magazine with creative layouts. Not possible. I have a collection of vintage computer magazines and from time to time I try to OCR them whith the state of the art mechanisms. All of them requiere a lot of human intervention

do you have an example of a particularly tricky one?

Just try old ads you will see how hard it gets

Could you provide an example that fails? I'm interested in this.

I use LLMWhisperer[1] for OCR'ing old magazine ads. It preserves the layout and context. Example > https://postimg.cc/ts3vT7kG

https://pg.llmwhisperer.unstract.com/

So, the mug with inspirational text says "Bountiful Potential"?

Lot's of OCR/ LLM's (Even Gemini Pro 2.5) still struggle converting complex tables to markdown or HTML: Tables with multiple headers and merged cells that get mixed up, multiple columns with tick boxes get mixed up, multi page tables that are not understood correctly. Also Llamaindex fails miserably on those things.

Curious to hear which OCR/ LLM excels with these specific issues? Example complex table: https://cdn.aviation.bot/complex-tables.zip

I can only parse this table correctly by first parsing the table headers manually into HTML as example output. However, it still mixes up tick boxes. Full table examples: https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/icao-compliance-checklist

I threw in the first image/table into Gemini 2.5 Pro letting it choose the output format and it looks like it extracted the data just fine. It decided to represent the checkboxes as "checked" and "unchecked" because I didn't specify preferences.

> Lot's of OCR/ LLM's (Even Gemini Pro 2.5) still struggle converting complex tables to markdown or HTML:

But that's something else, that's no longer just OCR ("Optical Character Recognition"). If the goal suddenly changes from "Can take letters in images and make into digital text" to "Can replicate anything seen on a screen", the problem-space gets too big.

For those images you have, I'd use something like Magistral + Structured Outputs instead, first pass figure out what's the right structure to parse into, second pass to actually fetch and structure the data.

htceaad t nofdnsy lyruuieo sieerrr t owcope?

> But that's something else, that's no longer just OCR ("Optical Character Recognition").

Lines often blur for technologies under such rapid evolution. Not sure it's helpful to nitpick the verbal semantics.

It is a fair question whether the OCR-inspired approach is the correct approach for more complex structured documents. But saying it's "not OCR" do doesn't seem meaningful from a technical perspective.

> But that's something else, that's no longer just OCR ("Optical Character Recognition").

Lines often blur for technologies under such rapid evolution. Not sure it's helpful to nitpick the verbal semantics.

It is a fair question whether the OCR-inspired approach is the correct approach for more complex structured documents where wider context may be important. But saying it's "not OCR" doesn't seem meaningful from a technical perspective. It's an extension of the same goal to convert images of documents into the most accurate and useful digitized form with the least manual intervention.

Personally I think it's a meaningful distinction between "Can extract text" VS "Can extract text and structure". It is true that some OCR systems can handle trying to replicate the structure, but still today I think that's the exception, not the norm.

Not to mention it's helpful to separate the two because there is such a big difference in the difficulty of the tasks.

OCR of printed text may be one thing, but handwriting OCR (a.k.a HTR) is very, very far from solved. It's actually hard to find a practical task general historical HTR is good enough to do usefully, even for state of the art models.

VLLMs suck at complex layouts and there is a high risk of hallucination. Never use alone for contracts or health data.

Maybe for English. Other languages are very much not solved.

Complex documents is where OCR struggles mightily. If you have a simple document with paragraphs of text, sure OCR is pretty solved. If you have a complex layout with figures and graphs and supporting images and asides and captions and so on (basically any paper, or even trade documents), it absolutely falls apart.

And GP LLMs are heinous at OCR. If you are having success with FL, your documents must be incredibly simple.

There has been enormous advances in OCR over the past 6 months, so the SoTa is a moving, rapidly advancing target.

I've only used tesseract, 'recreationally', but i tried generating images of random chars to see what resolution/contrast/noise was minimally recognisable; shocked at how bad it was. heavily relies on language models of character sequences, pretty useless On 'line noise'

Chinese, especially handwritten.

I think it'll be good to have an end-to-end pdf to latex converter for old math papers. For commutative diagrams almost all models still struggle. especially very complicated commutative diagrams.

> That will cost you around $0.20 for 1000 pages in batch mode and the results have been great.

Can you explain more about your setup ? I have a quarter million pages I want to OCR.

Why PDF parsing is Hell[1]:

Fixed layout and lack of semantic structure in PDFs.

Non-linear text flow due to columns, sidebars, or images.

Position-based text without contextual or relational markers.

Absence of standard structure tags (like in HTML).

Scanned or image-based PDFs requiring OCR.

Preprocessing needs for scanned PDFs (noise, rotation, skew).

Extracting tables from unstructured or visually complex layouts.

Multi-column and fancy layouts breaking semantic text order.

Background images and watermarks interfering with text extraction.

Handwritten text recognition challenges.

[1] https://unstract.com/blog/pdf-hell-and-practical-rag-applica...

I agree, Gemini 2.5 models are excellent.

The fuss around old fashioned OCR seemed strange to me initially considering the above, but I selfishly forgot to consider addressing compute/offline requirements.

It would also be nice for there to be a good competitor.

That will not work with many of the world's most important documents because of information density. For example, dense tables or tables with lots of row/col spans, or complex forms with checkboxess, complex real-world formatting and features like strikethroughs, etc.

To solve this generally you need to chunk not by page, but by semantic chunks that don't exceed the information density threshold of the model, given the task.

This is not a trivial problem at all. And sometimes there is no naive way to chunk documents so that every element can fit within the information density limit. A really simple example is a table that spans hundreds pages. Solving that generally is an open problem.

There is no "solved" in computer vision, there is only "good enough" and what constitutes "good enough" depends on your problem domain.

Take an OCR model with 99.9% character-wise accuracy. Sounds pretty good, right? Well if your use case is, say, digitalizing old printed novels, then yeah it's probably good enough.

But what if your documents are personal records with millions of names, to insert in some administrative database? Now 1 out of 1000 persons will have their name misspelled. Ooops.

OCR for printed documents is super robust, but handwriting, low res, and aligned recognition (not just image to "hello world" but also having "h is here in space e is here in space...) are all still well behind "basically solved."

Google vision it's still better than Gemini at OCR, for example at getting bounding boxes.

I attempted OCR using all of the open source models available about 3 months ago, including Llama 4. These were pngs of text using a regular font. Most produced garbage except Llama 4, and even then it was only about 90% accurate. Using OpenAI or Gemini produced much better results but the open source models were really bad.

> OmniAI benchmark that's also referenced here wasn't updated with new models since February 2025. I assume that's because general purpose LLMs have gotten better at OCR than their own OCR product.

Benchmark author here. No, just pivoted away from OCR API as a product! Still use our API internally but have been lazy about updating benchmarks.

Gemini is definitely the best model for OCR. But it has a really high rate of "recitation" errors. Where it will determine the output token is too close to its training data and cut it off. Something like 10% of the time from our testing. Also it has this hilarious hallucination when you have a blank page in the document mix and it just makes up new info.

OpenAI is OK. GPT5 wasn't any better than 4o or 4.1. Main issues were: dropping content like headers/footers, loses it's mind on sideways pages, and will frequently refuse to read things like ID documents, health care forms, or things it judges to have too much PII.

Clearly-printed text to a sequence of characters is solved, for use cases that don't require 100% accuracy.

But not for semantic document structure — recognizing that the grammatically incomplete phrase in a larger font is a heading, recognizing subheadings and bullet lists, tables, etc.

Also not for handwritten text, text inside of images (signage and so forth), or damaged source material (old photocopies and scans created in the old days).

Those areas all seem to me where an LLM-based approach could narrow the gap between machine recognition and humans. You have to sort of reason about it from the context as a human to figure it out, too.

Can someone ELI5 to me (someone who doesn't have the time to keep up with all the latest research) what this is and why it's a big deal?

It's very hard to guess from the github and paper. For example, there is OCR in the title but the abstract and readme.md talk about context compression for LLMs, which I find confusing. Somebody care to explain the link and provide some high-level context?

Suppose you have an image with 1000 words in it, and suppose for simplicity that every word is 1 token. Then the image is “worth” 1000 tokens.

But under the hood, the image will have to be transformed into features / embeddings before it can be decoded into text. Suppose that the image gets processed into 100 “image tokens”, which are subsequently decoded into 1000 “text tokens”.

Now forget that we are even talking about images or OCR. If you look at just the decoding process, you find that we were able to compress the output into a 10x smaller representation.

The implication for LLMs is that we don’t need 1000 tokens and 1000 token embeddings to produce the 1001st token, if we can figure out how to compress them into a 10x smaller latent representation first.

Excellent, thanks. So basically this is saying: "our pixels-to-token encoding is so efficient (information density in a set of "image tokens" is much higher as compared to a set of text tokens), why even bother representing text as text?"

Correct?

Basically. Some people are even saying, hey, if you encode text as an image then you don’t need tokenizers any more, and you get more expressivity from the graphic styling.

Another takeaway is that you don’t need to pass a tensor of shape (batch_size, sequence_length, d_model) through your transformer. Not every token needs its own dedicated latent embedding. You can presumably get away with dividing sequence_length by a constant.

This isn’t super ground breaking but it does reinforce the validity of a middle ground between recurrent models, where context is compressed into a single “memory token”, and transformers, where context is uncompressed. 1 < n/k < n

How does it compare to Tesseract? https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

I use ocrmypdf (which uses Tesseract). Runs locally and is absolutely fantastic. https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Indeed, seems the default benchmark is LLM/VLM based alternatives as if they somehow "solved" the problem but IMHO even if it goes from (totally made up numbers) 80% with tesseract to 95% with this or Qwen or whatever but it takes 100x harddisk with containers or a CUDA stack, dedicated hardware, e.g. GPU with 16GB or VRAM, etc then it's such a trade of it should be considered.

Hmm, at first I was thinking "why OCR?", but maybe the reason is to ingest more types of training data for LLM improvement, e.g. scanned academic papers? I imagine all the frontier labs have a solution for this due to the value of academic papers as a data source.

Edit: Oh I see the paper abstract says this explicitly: "In production, DeepSeek-OCR can generate training data for LLMs/VLMs at a scale of 200k+ pages per day (a single A100-40G)". This is just part of the training data ingestion pipeline for their real models. Explains why the architecture is not using all of their latest tricks: it's already good enough for their use case and it's not the main focus.

If we get ocr working it makes it possible to store all human knowledge now stored in PDF's with way less resources

https://annas-archive.org/blog/critical-window.html

This model (DeepSeek-OCR) aligns particularly well with what we know about written language and the human act of reading.

The Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) on the left side of the brain is where the visual representation of words is transformed to something more meaningful to the organism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_word_form_area

The DeepSeek-OCR encoding (rather than simple text encoding) appears analogous to what occurs in the VWFA.

This model may not only be more powerful than text-based LLMs but may open the curtain of ignorance that has stymied our understanding of how language works and ergo how we think, what intelligence is precisely, etc.

Kudos to the authors: Haoran Wei, Yaofeng Sun, Yukun Li. You may have tripped over the Rosetta Stone of intelligence itself! Bravo!

This could be great for extracting text from old magazines; traditional OCR gives you a bit of a mess you have to clean up, but this looks like it can properly identify columns and track the flow accurately (and extract images!) It appears it can convert magazine layouts to markdown too

This feels like another one of those stairstep ML/AI advances that makes computers behave eerily more like humans.

We tend to think in images rather than plaintext, and here we are discovering it's more efficient for a computer to do so as well.

I tried this out on huggingface, and it has the same issue as every other multimodal AI OCR option (including MinerU, olmOCR, Gemini, ChatGPT, ...). It ignores pictures, charts, and other visual elements in a document, even though the models are pretty good at describing images and charts by themselves. What this means is that you can't use these tools yet to create fully accessible alternatives to PDFs.

I have a lot of success asking models such as Gemini to OCR the text, and then to describe any images on the document, including charts. I have it format the sections with XML-ish tags. This also works for tables.

Seems there’s still some confusion around what DeepSeek-OCR really does. Learn about the model, Contexts Optical Compression, and its impact on LLMs here: https://www.bentoml.com/blog/deepseek-ocr-contexts-optical-c...

It says the conversation can reduce size with large compression, which basic make the image blur but still contaim import information.

This is indeed amazing. It's actually how human try to understand and remember things. BY VISUAL! And when memory fade out, the image are getting blurred.

Not sure if those close source multimodal models are already using this method.

I see that the project uses conda for development. Is it still a good tool now that pip also install binaries?

No. Everyone should be using uv instead.

It’s not clear to me what the bottleneck for OCR to “100%” work with LLMS is.

In my work we do a lot of stuff with image understanding and captioning (not OCR). There object identification and description works great, since all the models are using a CLIP like visual backbone. But it falls apart when you ask about nuances like left/right or counting (reasoning kind of improves the latter but it’s too expensive to matter IMO).

For our tasks, it’s clear that there’s more fundamental research that needs to be done on vision understanding to push past CLIP. That would really improve LLMs for our usecases.

Curious if there’s something similar going on for OCR in the vision encoder that’s fundamentally holding it back.

How does this compare to https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-docling-258M in performance and how they work?

The granite Dockling models are unfortunately quite far below SOTA. dots-ocr and PaddleOCR were best here.

Looks great, but looking at the benchmark, can’t help but think about how crazy good dots-ocr is as a model. Too bad they’re not as open as the Deepseek team because its so crazy good and would love to know how it was trained.

If you look you'd notice that it's the same Haoran Wei behind DeepSeek-OCR and GOT-OCR2.0 :p

Oh you’re right! Good catch!

Did we read the same graph? DeepSeek Gundam 200 dpi appeared to get similar perf as dots-ocr, but with less tokens needed. The x axis is inverted, descending with distance from the origin.

Is this only at the level of visual compression? For example, are there any applications in terms of understanding (being able to represent the actual meaning it stands for) and reasoning? Technically, it seems to have no connection with current reinforcement learning and other techniques. The model is quite small, yet there appears to be no explanation regarding its understanding capabilities. If it is merely for compression, what impact will it have on the current large models?

This looks really cool for prototyping and playing around.

It seems to me though if one is building a modern application that needs to get image segmentation and/or text recognition right there are better APIs available than natural language? It seems like a lot of effort to make a production-scale CV application to weigh it down with all of an LLM’s shortcomings. Not a field I’m familiar with but I would assume that this doesn’t produce state of the art results—that would change the analysis.

Imagine you build an image segmentation model for a e.g. specific industrial application.

With this LLM approach you can at least create your training data from the raw images with natural language.

That does make sense

As a hobby photographer, I organise everything for speedy retrieval but this would be amazing to search my collection.

I find it interesting that there's all these independent AI-OCR Projects but still no commercial offering. Is it still too inaccurate, too complex or simply too expensive?

I dont know, but maybe existing commercial OCR is still on top, and also using ML. Recently tried a free trial for OCR/reading Sütterlin and it was a weird feeling being so outclassed in reading.

It is because the AI is not actually doing OCR. It is giving an interpretation of what the text in an image is by ingesting vision tokens and mapping them onto text tokens.

So you either have to be fine with a lot of uncertainty as to the accuracy of that interpretation or you have to wait for an LLM that can do it in a completely reproducible way every time.

Mistral offers their OCR commercially through their API and in their Chat services, at least.

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr

https://cloud.google.com/document-ai

There are commercial OCR offerings from the big cloud providers (plus, like, Adobe). In my experience they generally outperform anything open-weights, although there's been a lot of improvement in VLMs in the past year or two.

One that I’ve seen recently is https://reducto.ai It appears to be an OCR wrapper.

https://docstrange.nanonets.com/ as well, wrapper on top of 7B version of https://huggingface.co/nanonets/Nanonets-OCR2-3B

It's deepseek so one can expect an open-source license but for anyone (like me) who wants to see that explicitly, since it's not obvious in the GitHub repo: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR/blob/main/LI...

TLDR: It's MIT licensed

> since it's not obvious in the GitHub repo

Literally says MIT license on the right sidebar and in the readme tab and in the file called LICENSE

Model weights are MIT too: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR/blob/main/LI...

The compression framing is super interesting. It makes me wonder if there’s an equivalent notion for source code - like how much “information” or entropy a commit contains vs. boilerplate churn.

I’ve been exploring Git activity analysis recently and ran into similar trade-offs: how do you tokenize real-world code and avoid counting noise?

It's interesting how they use "Gundam" in their variant names. I gather that Gundam-M and Gundam are their most powerful ones.

I think maybe to distinguish their dynamic resolution approach from the t-shirt sizes, which have a fixed input. (Although I don't know why "Gundam")

Kinda reminds me of PaddleOCR.

Would be awesome if DeepSeek OCR could be integrated into a mobile app someday. That’d make OCR way more convenient!

iOS already have on device both text detector and document scanner in apple Vision API. Hard to say how good are they compared to LLM based solutions. Similarly google had MLKit with OCR working on devices also for many years.

Top 3 models on huggingface are all OCR models. Most automation projects involve documents where you need a model finetuned to understand all elements inside documents and provide grounding and confidence scores etc which is why these subset of models are gaining popularity

  >先天下之忧而忧

How is this an example of a prompt?

Google translated this to "Worry about the world first" while Bing says "Worry before the worries of the world."

Can anyone shed some light on this saying or why it's in the article?

Google is closer. This is from a famous essay expressing tbe author's desire to bear the burden for the world. Essay is 岳阳楼记 by 范仲淹 in year 1046 https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/%E5%B2%B3%E9%99%BD%E6%A8%9...

Ask a language model - ChatGPT says it’s a line from a famous poem “Memorial to Yueyang Tower” which expresses the Confucian ideal of selfless concern for people and society.

It's a very famous (classical) Chinese phrase.

Both translations don't catch the meaning well though. It means: "worry before the rest of the world (notice that they have something to) worry." The next part is 後天下之樂而樂("be happy only after the rest of the world is happy.")

I don't know why it's a prompt example.

Sibling comment has the second part as

后天下之乐而乐

which one is correct?

Traditional vs Simplified Chinese.

There are two (modern) "spellings" of written Chinese. Basically colour vs color.

It depends on who you think is the rightful successor to the Qing dynasty

Wrong. It merely depends on whether the local policy maker before computer age prioritize reducing illiteracy and convenience over other considerations.

Macau, HK and Taiwan uses traditional Chinese character.

Mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia use simplified Chinese character.

Japan uses its own version, some simplified, some traditional, and also invented over 100 Japanese-made-Kanji following the same logic how Chinese characters are formed.

As a matter of fact, simplification of Chinese characters started when KMT/Republic of China was in control of the whole China. Politics gets in the way later and RoC stopped this simplification process while PRC kept it going, Macau & HK were not involved since the Portuguese and British colonial government doesn't care. Singapore and Malaysia pick the simplified version out of convenience.

This clause is usually used together with the next sentence in the original poem:

> 先天下之忧而忧，后天下之乐而乐

> (put the world's worries before yours, and put your happiness after the world's) > edit: this translation is wrong, and raincole has a definitely better translation

Since the model is a language model, they probably use this to demonstrate the model's language capabilities – the model should be able to complete the whole sentence pair. The paper also mentions this:

> To ensure the model’s language capabilities, we introduced 10% of in-house text-only pretrain data.

So I believe it is just a text-only demonstration.

Sibling comment has the second part as

後天下之樂而樂

Which one is correct?

  a) 后天下之乐而乐
  b) 後天下之樂而樂
  c) 後天下之楽而楽

a) is clearly Simplified Chinese from a sibling comment, b) is Traditional copied from your comment, and c) is as I just typed in my own language. Unicode Hanzi/Kanji are a mess and there are characters same or different, in appearance or in binary, depending on intended variants, languages, fonts, systems, keyboard, distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri, etc.

Fascinating! That's exactly why I asked, so thank you.

Do people usually recognize all variants as valid and legible? Or does any particular set of letters/symbols prevail in practice?

Very location dependent. But when you learn to write the characters you understand the variants differently. They look like random strokes to an untrained eye. But they’re not. I’m not sure if that makes sense.

Take a lowercase a in English for example. This font writes it differently than a child. Or in cursive. Or probably than you would write it. But you recognize all of them and don’t really think about it.

Traditional kinds are usually recognizable, but I'd be unsure or straight up wrong about most Simplified versions. Overall proportions and small details often feel "wrong" for both as well due to cultures converging at different points.

a) Simplified Chinese

b) Traditional Chinese

c) 楽 is a variation of 樂, which is now widely used in Japanese Kanji but deprecated in Traditional Chinese.

Note:

A variation means some people write 樂 as 楽 in ancient China, but not widely adopted.

Kanji is a Japanese word, means "Chinese Character".

How does this fair with the Vidore benchmark?

https://huggingface.co/spaces/vidore/vidore-leaderboard

Is there any 'small' OCR models around?

Say I only care about reading serial numbers from photos in a manufacturing process, not whole document parsing. Using a 3B param model to do this seems like a bit of overkill...

Language support is not mentioned in the repo. But from the paper, it offers extensive multilingual support (nearly 100 languages) which is good, but I need to test it to see how it compares to Gemini and Mistral OCR.

I suspect the number of langauges it can do with reasonable accuracy is actually much smaller, probably <15.

Have yall seen tensorlake? I’m curious how this compares to a model custom built for the problem. My guess is it can be as good. But can it be as efficient?

disclaimer: I do not work for tensorlake—but i know the folks behind it.

The only model that I found so far that extract table data with OCR is dots.ocr. Models that came after it have not done a good job. Interesting on testing this new model.

Instead of downloading a specific OCR model how would one fare just downloading the currently best multi-modal foundation model? And what would that be at less than 30 GB?

Then you can just download finetuned version of same multi-modal foundation model that's trained on documents?

OCR is not a great name for these models. While they can do traditional OCR such as digitize and scanned PDF for example, they do so much more.

>they do so much more I'm not familiar. What else are they good for?

They can take something like an image of a graph and provide a description of it. From my understanding, these are multimodal models with reasoning capabilities.

Great work guys, how about we replace the global encoder with a Mamba (state-space) vision backbone to eliminate the O(n²) attention bottleneck, enabling linear-complexity encoding of high-resolution documents. Pair this with a non-autoregressive (Non-AR) decoder—such as Mask-Predict or iterative refinement—that generates all output tokens in parallel instead of sequentially. Together, this creates a fully parallelizable vision-to-text pipeline, The combination addresses both major bottlenecks in DeepSeek-OCR.

not sure why i m getting downvoted. Would love to have a technical discussion on the validity of my suggestions.

DeepSeek-OCR revolutionizes document processing by converting text into high-resolution images, achieving up to 20× compression while maintaining impressive accuracy. At a 10× compression ratio, it retains approximately 97% accuracy, and even at 20×, it maintains around 60% accuracy Tom's Hardware .

This approach reduces token usage significantly, making it particularly beneficial for industries like finance, healthcare, and legal sectors. For a comprehensive guide on implementing and utilizing DeepSeek-OCR, you can check https://deepseeksguides.com/deepseek-ocr-guide/

How good is this compared to most commercial OCR software?

Any vision model is better than commercial OCR software.

I'm not really sure if that's an accurate summary of the state of the art, [0] is a better overview. In short, SOTA multi-modal LLMs are the best option for handwriting, nearly anything is good at printed text, for printed media, specialty models from hyperscalers are slightly better than multi-modal LLMs.

[0] https://research.aimultiple.com/ocr-accuracy/

I see it confirms what I wrote state of art is “not using tessaract anymore” and I think bunch of commercial solutions are stuck with tessaract.

I assume Tesseract has the advantage of being able to give a confidence score?

Since “commercial OCR software” includes VLM-based commercial offerings, that's clearly not correct.

Please a bit of education, what does it do?

> [2025/x/x] We release DeepSeek-OCR, a model to investigate the role of vision encoders from an LLM-centric viewpoint.

So close but it should be 2025/X/XX as "X" = 10 in Roman Numerals /s

Jokes aside, this is really neat and I'm looking forward to getting this running. For most OCR-type stuff I just use AWS Textract since I need it so rarely and that service does a decent job. I really like how well this model seems to extract images/figures as well from the original document.

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