PP-OCRv5: A Specialized 5M-Parameter Model Rivaling Billion-Parameter Vision-Language Models on OCR Tasks

The advent of "OCR 2.0" and large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) has set new benchmarks in text recognition. However, these unified architectures often come with significant computational demands, challenges in precise text localization within complex layouts, and a propensity for textual hallucinations. Revisiting the prevailing notion that model scale is the sole path to high accuracy, this paper introduces PP-OCRv5, a meticulously optimized, lightweight OCR system with merely 5 million parameters. We demonstrate that PP-OCRv5 achieves performance competitive with many billion-parameter VLMs on standard OCR benchmarks, while offering superior localization precision and reduced hallucinations. The cornerstone of our success lies not in architectural expansion but in a data-centric investigation. We systematically dissect the role of training data by quantifying three critical dimensions: data difficulty, data accuracy, and data diversity. Our extensive experiments reveal that with a sufficient volume of high-quality, accurately labeled, and diverse data, the performance ceiling for traditional, efficient two-stage OCR pipelines is far higher than commonly assumed. This work provides compelling evidence for the viability of lightweight, specialized models in the large-model era and offers practical insights into data curation for OCR. The source code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR.

Boosting Document Parsing Efficiency and Performance with Coarse-to-Fine Visual Processing

Document parsing is a fine-grained task where image resolution significantly impacts performance. While advanced research leveraging vision-language models benefits from high-resolution input to boost model performance, this often leads to a quadratic increase in the number of vision tokens and significantly raises computational costs. We attribute this inefficiency to substantial visual regions redundancy in document images, like background. To tackle this, we propose PaddleOCR-VL, a novel coarse-to-fine architecture that focuses on semantically relevant regions while suppressing redundant ones, thereby improving both efficiency and performance. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight Valid Region Focus Module (VRFM) which leverages localization and contextual relationship prediction capabilities to identify valid vision tokens. Subsequently, we design and train a compact yet powerful 0.9B vision-language model (PaddleOCR-VL-0.9B) to perform detailed recognition, guided by VRFM outputs to avoid direct processing of the entire large image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PaddleOCR-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance in both page-level parsing and element-level recognition. It significantly outperforms existing solutions, exhibits strong competitiveness against top-tier VLMs, and delivers fast inference while utilizing substantially fewer vision tokens and parameters, highlighting the effectiveness of targeted coarse-to-fine parsing for accurate and efficient document understanding. The source code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR.

Real5-OmniDocBench: A Full-Scale Physical Reconstruction Benchmark for Robust Document Parsing in the Wild

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve near-perfect scores on digital document benchmarks like OmniDocBench, their performance in the unpredictable physical world remains largely unknown due to the lack of controlled yet realistic evaluations. We introduce Real5-OmniDocBench, the first benchmark that performs a full-scale, one-to-one physical reconstruction of the entire OmniDocBench v1.5 (1,355 images) across five critical real-world scenarios: Scanning, Warping, Screen-Photography, Illumination, and Skew. Unlike prior benchmark that either lack digital correspondence or employ partial sampling, our complete ground-truth mapping enables, for the first time, rigorous factor-wise attribution of performance degradation-allowing us to pinpoint whether failures stem from geometric distortions, optical artifacts, or model limitations. Our benchmark establishes a challenging new standard for the community, demonstrating that the 'reality gap' in document parsing is far from closed, and provides a diagnostic tool to guide the development of truly resilient document intelligence.

PaddleOCR-VL-1.5: Towards a Multi-Task 0.9B VLM for Robust In-the-Wild Document Parsing

We introduce PaddleOCR-VL-1.5, an upgraded model achieving a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy of 94.5% on OmniDocBench v1.5. To rigorously evaluate robustness against real-world physical distortions, including scanning, skew, warping, screen-photography, and illumination, we propose the Real5-OmniDocBench benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that this enhanced model attains SOTA performance on the newly curated benchmark. Furthermore, we extend the model's capabilities by incorporating seal recognition and text spotting tasks, while remaining a 0.9B ultra-compact VLM with high efficiency. Code: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

PaddleOCR-VL: Boosting Multilingual Document Parsing via a 0.9B Ultra-Compact Vision-Language Model

In this report, we propose PaddleOCR-VL, a SOTA and resource-efficient model tailored for document parsing. Its core component is PaddleOCR-VL-0.9B, a compact yet powerful vision-language model (VLM) that integrates a NaViT-style dynamic resolution visual encoder with the ERNIE-4.5-0.3B language model to enable accurate element recognition. This innovative model efficiently supports 109 languages and excels in recognizing complex elements (e.g., text, tables, formulas, and charts), while maintaining minimal resource consumption. Through comprehensive evaluations on widely used public benchmarks and in-house benchmarks, PaddleOCR-VL achieves SOTA performance in both page-level document parsing and element-level recognition. It significantly outperforms existing solutions, exhibits strong competitiveness against top-tier VLMs, and delivers fast inference speeds. These strengths make it highly suitable for practical deployment in real-world scenarios.

PP-ShiTu: A Practical Lightweight Image Recognition System

In recent years, image recognition applications have developed rapidly. A large number of studies and techniques have emerged in different fields, such as face recognition, pedestrian and vehicle re-identification, landmark retrieval, and product recognition. In this paper, we propose a practical lightweight image recognition system, named PP-ShiTu, consisting of the following 3 modules, mainbody detection, feature extraction and vector search. We introduce popular strategies including metric learning, deep hash, knowledge distillation and model quantization to improve accuracy and inference speed. With strategies above, PP-ShiTu works well in different scenarios with a set of models trained on a mixed dataset. Experiments on different datasets and benchmarks show that the system is widely effective in different domains of image recognition. All the above mentioned models are open-sourced and the code is available in the GitHub repository PaddleClas on PaddlePaddle.

PP-LCNet: A Lightweight CPU Convolutional Neural Network

We propose a lightweight CPU network based on the MKLDNN acceleration strategy, named PP-LCNet, which improves the performance of lightweight models on multiple tasks. This paper lists technologies which can improve network accuracy while the latency is almost constant. With these improvements, the accuracy of PP-LCNet can greatly surpass the previous network structure with the same inference time for classification. As shown in Figure 1, it outperforms the most state-of-the-art models. And for downstream tasks of computer vision, it also performs very well, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, etc. All our experiments are implemented based on PaddlePaddle. Code and pretrained models are available at PaddleClas.