**dots.ocr** is a powerful, multilingual document parser that unifies layout detection and content recognition within a single vision-language model while maintaining good reading order. Despite its compact 1.7B-parameter LLM foundation, it achieves state-of-the-art(SOTA) performance.
1.**Powerful Performance:****dots.ocr** achieves SOTA performance for text, tables, and reading order on [OmniDocBench](https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench), while delivering formula recognition results comparable to much larger models like Doubao-1.5 and gemini2.5-pro.
2.**Multilingual Support:****dots.ocr** demonstrates robust parsing capabilities for low-resource languages, achieving decisive advantages across both layout detection and content recognition on our in-house multilingual documents benchmark.
3.**Unified and Simple Architecture:** By leveraging a single vision-language model, **dots.ocr** offers a significantly more streamlined architecture than conventional methods that rely on complex, multi-model pipelines. Switching between tasks is accomplished simply by altering the input prompt, proving that a VLM can achieve competitive detection results compared to traditional detection models like DocLayout-YOLO.
4.**Efficient and Fast Performance:** Built upon a compact 1.7B LLM, **dots.ocr** provides faster inference speeds than many other high-performing models based on larger foundations.
prompt = """Please output the layout information from the PDF image, including each layout element's bbox, its category, and the corresponding text content within the bbox.
1. Bbox format: [x1, y1, x2, y2]
2. Layout Categories: The possible categories are ['Caption', 'Footnote', 'Formula', 'List-item', 'Page-footer', 'Page-header', 'Picture', 'Section-header', 'Table', 'Text', 'Title'].
3. Text Extraction & Formatting Rules:
- Picture: For the 'Picture' category, the text field should be omitted.
- Formula: Format its text as LaTeX.
- Table: Format its text as HTML.
- All Others (Text, Title, etc.): Format their text as Markdown.
4. Constraints:
- The output text must be the original text from the image, with no translation.
- All layout elements must be sorted according to human reading order.
5. Final Output: The entire output must be a single JSON object.
> - The EN, ZH metrics are the end2end evaluation results of [OmniDocBench](https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench), and Multilingual metric is the end2end evaluation results of dots.ocr-bench.
## News
* ```2025.07.30 ``` 🚀 We release [dots.ocr](https://github.com/rednote-hilab/dots.ocr), — a multilingual documents parsing model based on 1.7b llm, with SOTA performance.
## Benchmark Results
### 1. OmniDocBench
#### The end-to-end evaluation results of different tasks.
> - The metrics are from [MonkeyOCR](https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/MonkeyOCR), [OmniDocBench](https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench), and our own internal evaluations.
> - We delete the Page-header and Page-footer cells in the result markdown.
> - We use tikz_preprocess pipeline to upsample the images to dpi 200.
### 2. **dots.ocr-bench**
This is an inhouse benchmark which contain 1493 pdf images with 100 languages.
#### The end-to-end evaluation results of different tasks.
> - prompt_layout_all_en for **parse all**, prompt_layout_only_en for **detection only**, please refer to [prompts](https://github.com/rednote-hilab/dots.ocr/blob/master/dots_ocr/utils/prompts.py)
If you have trouble with the installation, try our [Docker Image](https://hub.docker.com/r/rednotehilab/dots.ocr) for an easier setup, and follow these steps:
> 💡**Note:** Please use a directory name without periods (e.g., `DotsOCR` instead of `dots.ocr`) for the model save path. This is a temporary workaround pending our integration with Transformers.
We highly recommend using vllm for deployment and inference. All of our evaluations results are based on vllm version 0.9.1.
The [Docker Image](https://hub.docker.com/r/rednotehilab/dots.ocr) is based on the official vllm image. You can also follow [Dockerfile](https://github.com/rednote-hilab/dots.ocr/blob/master/docker/Dockerfile) to build the deployment environment by yourself.
export hf_model_path=./weights/DotsOCR # Path to your downloaded model weights, Please use a directory name without periods (e.g., `DotsOCR` instead of `dots.ocr`) for the model save path. This is a temporary workaround pending our integration with Transformers.
from DotsOCR import modeling_dots_ocr_vllm' `which vllm` # If you downloaded model weights by yourself, please replace `DotsOCR` by your model saved directory name, and remember to use a directory name without periods (e.g., `DotsOCR` instead of `dots.ocr`)
prompt = """Please output the layout information from the PDF image, including each layout element's bbox, its category, and the corresponding text content within the bbox.
1. Bbox format: [x1, y1, x2, y2]
2. Layout Categories: The possible categories are ['Caption', 'Footnote', 'Formula', 'List-item', 'Page-footer', 'Page-header', 'Picture', 'Section-header', 'Table', 'Text', 'Title'].
3. Text Extraction & Formatting Rules:
- Picture: For the 'Picture' category, the text field should be omitted.
- Formula: Format its text as LaTeX.
- Table: Format its text as HTML.
- All Others (Text, Title, etc.): Format their text as Markdown.
4. Constraints:
- The output text must be the original text from the image, with no translation.
- All layout elements must be sorted according to human reading order.
5. Final Output: The entire output must be a single JSON object.
1.**Structured Layout Data** (`demo_image1.json`): A JSON file containing the detected layout elements, including their bounding boxes, categories, and extracted text.
2.**Processed Markdown File** (`demo_image1.md`): A Markdown file generated from the concatenated text of all detected cells.
* An additional version, `demo_image1_nohf.md`, is also provided, which excludes page headers and footers for compatibility with benchmarks like Omnidocbench and olmOCR-bench.
3.**Layout Visualization** (`demo_image1.jpg`): The original image with the detected layout bounding boxes drawn on it.
</details>
## 4. Demo
You can run the demo with the following command, or try directly at [live demo](https://dotsocr.xiaohongshu.com/)
We would like to thank [Qwen2.5-VL](https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen2.5-VL), [aimv2](https://github.com/apple/ml-aim), [MonkeyOCR](https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/MonkeyOCR),
[OmniDocBench](https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench), [PyMuPDF](https://github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF), for providing code and models.
We also thank [DocLayNet](https://github.com/DS4SD/DocLayNet), [M6Doc](https://github.com/HCIILAB/M6Doc), [CDLA](https://github.com/buptlihang/CDLA), [D4LA](https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery) for providing valuable datasets.
## Limitation & Future Work
- **Complex Document Elements:**
- **Table&Formula**: dots.ocr is not yet perfect for high-complexity tables and formula extraction.
- **Picture**: Pictures in documents are currently not parsed.
- **Parsing Failures:** The model may fail to parse under certain conditions:
- When the character-to-pixel ratio is excessively high. Try enlarging the image or increasing the PDF parsing DPI (a setting of 200 is recommended). However, please note that the model performs optimally on images with a resolution under 11289600 pixels.
- Continuous special characters, such as ellipses (`...`) and underscores (`_`), may cause the prediction output to repeat endlessly. In such scenarios, consider using alternative prompts like `prompt_layout_only_en`, `prompt_ocr`, or `prompt_grounding_ocr` ([details here](https://github.com/rednote-hilab/dots.ocr/blob/master/dots_ocr/utils/prompts.py)).
- **Performance Bottleneck:** Despite its 1.7B parameter LLM foundation, **dots.ocr** is not yet optimized for high-throughput processing of large PDF volumes.
We are committed to achieving more accurate table and formula parsing, as well as enhancing the model's OCR capabilities for broader generalization, all while aiming for **a more powerful, more efficient model**. Furthermore, we are actively considering the development of **a more general-purpose perception model** based on Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which would integrate general detection, image captioning, and OCR tasks into a unified framework. **Parsing the content of the pictures in the documents** is also a key priority for our future work.
We believe that collaboration is the key to tackling these exciting challenges. If you are passionate about advancing the frontiers of document intelligence and are interested in contributing to these future endeavors, we would love to hear from you. Please reach out to us via email at: [yanqing4@xiaohongshu.com].
