LightOnOCR: A 1B End-to-End Multilingual Vision-Language Model for State-of-the-Art OCR
We present LightOnOCR-2-1B, a 1B-parameter end-to-end multilingual vision--language model that converts document images (e.g., PDFs) into clean, naturally ordered text without brittle OCR pipelines. Trained on a large-scale, high-quality distillation mix with strong coverage of scans, French documents, and scientific PDFs, LightOnOCR-2 achieves state-of-the-art results on OlmOCR-Bench while being 9times smaller and substantially faster than prior best-performing models. We further extend the output format to predict normalized bounding boxes for embedded images, introducing localization during pretraining via a resume strategy and refining it with RLVR using IoU-based rewards. Finally, we improve robustness with checkpoint averaging and task-arithmetic merging. We release model checkpoints under Apache 2.0, and publicly release the dataset and LightOnOCR-bbox-bench evaluation under their respective licenses.
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Said Taghadouini
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2026-01-21T10:39:37.432Z
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Said Taghadouini
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Adrien Cavaillès
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2026-01-21T10:51:23.521Z
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Adrien Cavaillès
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Baptiste Aubertin
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2026-01-21T10:48:01.934Z
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Baptiste Aubertin
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LightOnOCR: A 1B End-to-End Multilingual Vision-Language Model for State-of-the-Art OCR
We present LightOnOCR-2-1B, a 1B-parameter end-to-end multilingual vision--language model that converts document images (e.g., PDFs) into clean, naturally ordered text without brittle OCR pipelines. Trained on a large-scale, high-quality distillation mix with strong coverage of scans, French documents, and scientific PDFs, LightOnOCR-2 achieves state-of-the-art results on OlmOCR-Bench while being 9times smaller and substantially faster than prior best-performing models. We further extend the output format to predict normalized bounding boxes for embedded images, introducing localization during pretraining via a resume strategy and refining it with RLVR using IoU-based rewards. Finally, we improve robustness with checkpoint averaging and task-arithmetic merging. We release model checkpoints under Apache 2.0, and publicly release the dataset and LightOnOCR-bbox-bench evaluation under their respective licenses.
LightOnOCR-2-1B is a compact 1B-parameter vision-language model that performs end-to-end document image-to-text conversion with improved localization and robustness through specialized training techniques.
vision-language model OCR pipeline distillation mix pretraining checkpoint averaging task-arithmetic merging localization resume strategy RLVR IoU-based rewards