[Image blocked: LightOnOCR-2-1B-bbox-soup Banner]
LightOnOCR-2-1B-bbox-soup
Merged bbox variant (advanced). This model combines OCR-improving RLVR signals with bounding-box-focused RLVR updates via joint merging, preserving OCR quality while providing image localization.
About LightOnOCR-2
LightOnOCR-2 is an efficient end-to-end 1B-parameter vision-language model for converting documents (PDFs, scans, images) into clean, naturally ordered text without relying on brittle pipelines. This second version is trained on a larger and higher-quality corpus with stronger French, arXiv, and scan coverage, improved LaTeX handling, and cleaner normalization. LightOnOCR-2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on OlmOCR-Bench while being ~9Γ smaller and significantly faster than competing approaches.
Highlights
- β‘ Speed: 3.3Γ faster than Chandra OCR, 1.7Γ faster than OlmOCR, 5Γ faster than dots.ocr, 2Γ faster than PaddleOCR-VL-0.9B, 1.73Γ faster than DeepSeekOCR
- πΈ Efficiency: Processes 5.71 pages/s on a single H100 (~493k pages/day) for <$0.01 per 1,000 pages
- π§ End-to-End: Fully differentiable, no external OCR pipeline
- π§Ύ Versatile: Handles tables, receipts, forms, multi-column layouts, and math notation
- π Image detection: Predicts bounding boxes for embedded images (bbox variants)
π Paper | π Blog Post | π Demo | π Dataset | π BBox Dataset | π Finetuning Notebook
Model Variants
Image Localization
The output format for embedded images is:
Where coordinates are normalized to [0, 1000].
Benchmarks
[Image blocked: OlmOCR-Bench Results]
See the paper for full benchmark details and methodology.
Usage with Transformers
Note: LightOnOCR-2 requires transformers installed from source (not yet in a stable release).
Usage with vLLM
Rendering and Preprocessing Tips
- Render PDFs to PNG or JPEG at a target longest dimension of 1540px
- Maintain aspect ratio to preserve text geometry
- Use one image per page; batching supported by vLLM
Fine-tuning
LightOnOCR-2 is fully differentiable and supports:
- LoRA fine-tuning
- Domain adaptation with image localization requirements
- Multilingual fine-tuning with task-specific corpora
For fine-tuning with bounding boxes, we recommend starting with LightOnOCR-2-1B-bbox-base instead of this merged variant.
License
Apache License 2.0
Acknowlegments
The project received funding from the BPI Scribe project.
Citation