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Comment by Tiberium | Hacker News Reader

From a tweet: https://x.com/i/status/2001821298109120856

> can someone help folks at Mistral find more weak baselines to add here? since they can't stomach comparing with SoTA....

> (in case y'all wanna fix it: Chandra, dots.ocr, olmOCR, MinerU, Monkey OCR, and PaddleOCR are a good start)

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I've worked on document extraction a lot and while the tweet is too flippant for my taste, it's not wrong. Mistral is comparing itself to non-VLM computer vision services. While not necessarily what everyone needs, they are a very different beasts compared to VLM based extraction because it gives you precise bounding boxes, usually at the cost of larger "document understanding".

Its failure mode are also vastly different. VLM-based extraction can misread entire sentences or miss entire paragraphs. Sonnet 3 had that issue. Computer vision models instead will make in-word typos.

Why not use both? I just built a pipeline for document data extraction that uses PaddleOCR, then Gemini 3 to check + fix errors. It gets close to 99.9% on extraction from financial statements finally on par with humans.

I did the opposite. Tesseract to get bboxes, words, and chars and then mistral on the clips with some reasonable reflow to preserve geometry. Paddle wasn’t working on my local machine (until I found RapidOCR). Surya was also very good but because you can’t really tweak any knobs, when it failed it just kinda failed. But Surya > Rapid w/ Paddle > DocTr > Tesseract while the latter gave me the most granularity when I needed it.

Edit: Gemini 2.0 was good enough for VLM cleanup, and now 2.5 or above with structured output make reconstruction even easier.

This is The Way. Remember AI doesn't have to replace existing solutions but can tactfully supplement it.

Is DeepSeek's not VLM?

after clicking on your link I browsed twitter for a minute and damn that place has become weird (or maybe it always was?)

As someone who has been on Twitter since 2007, it’s radically changed in the last few years to the point of being unrecognizable.

Also, do you know if their benchmarks are available?

In their website, the benchmarks say “Multilingual (Chinese), Multilingual (East-asian), Multilingual (Eastern europe), Multilingual (English), Multilingual (Western europe), Forms, Handwritten, etc.” However, there’s no reference to the benchmark data.

I'd want to see a comparison with Qwen 3 VL 235B-A22B, which is IME significantly better than MinerU.

On the OP link, they compare themselves to the capabilities of leaderboard AI's and beat them.

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