# UniRec-0.1B: Unified Text and Formula Recognition with 0.1B Parameters

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21095 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21095/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04434/) (2024)
- [An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Image-based Sequence Recognition and Its Application to Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.05717/) (2015)
- [OCR-free Document Understanding Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15664/) (2021)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Kimi-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07491/) (2025)
- [Seed1.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07062/) (2025)
- [MinerU: An Open-Source Solution for Precise Document Content Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18839/) (2024)
- [Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13418/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2227/) (2014)
- [Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06495/) (2021)
- [Focal Modulation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11926/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18234/) (2025)
- [General OCR Theory: Towards OCR-2.0 via a Unified End-to-end Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01704/) (2024)
- [TextMonkey: An OCR-Free Large Multimodal Model for Understanding Document](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04473/) (2024)
- [OmniDocBench: Benchmarking Diverse PDF Document Parsing with Comprehensive Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07626/) (2024)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06966/) (2022)
- [PaddleOCR 3.0 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05595/) (2025)
- [Towards Accurate Scene Text Recognition with Semantic Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12294/) (2020)
- [Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00751/) (2018)
- [olmOCR: Unlocking Trillions of Tokens in PDFs with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18443/) (2025)
- [ICDAR 2019 Competition on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling -- RRC-LSVT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07741/) (2019)
- [MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22186/) (2025)
- [Towards End-to-End Unified Scene Text Detection and Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15143/) (2022)
- [PaddleOCR-VL: Boosting Multilingual Document Parsing via a 0.9B Ultra-Compact Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14528/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [MinerU2.5-Pro: Pushing the Limits of Data-Centric Document Parsing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04771/) (2026)
- [PaddleOCR-VL-1.6: Expanding the Frontier of Document Parsing with Under-Optimized Region Refinement and Progressive Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03264/) (2026)
- [ClawGUI: A Unified Framework for Training, Evaluating, and Deploying GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11784/) (2026)
- [HunyuanOCR-1.5: Making Lightweight OCR VLMs Faster and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04884/) (2026)
- [OvisOCR2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13639/) (2026)
- [How Far Is Document Parsing from Solved? PureDocBench: A Source-Traceable Benchmark across Clean, Degraded, and Real-World Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07492/) (2026)
- [ABot-OCR Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27978/) (2026)
- [What Is Wrong with Synthetic Data for Scene Text Recognition? A Strong Synthetic Engine with Diverse Simulations and Self-Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06450/) (2026)
- [All-in-One Multilingual Scene Text Recognition with Script-aware Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24058/) (2026)
- [HPD-Parsing: Hierarchical Parallel Document Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18839/) (2026)
- [TeleOCR: Navigating Document Parsing Across Digital and Camera-Captured Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12898/) (2026)
- [WeVisDoc: From Coverage to Capability for Robust End-to-End Document Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20423/) (2026)
- [Xiaomi-OCR-0 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36136/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text and formulas constitute the core informational components of many documents. Accurately and efficiently recognizing both is crucial for developing robust and generalizable document parsing systems. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive unified recognition of text and formulas. However, they are large-sized and computationally demanding, restricting their usage in many applications. In this paper, we propose UniRec-0.1B, a unified recognition model with only 0.1B parameters. It is capable of performing text and formula recognition at multiple levels, including characters, words, lines, paragraphs, and documents. To implement this task, we first establish UniRec40M, a large-scale dataset comprises 40 million text, formula and mixed samples, enabling the training of a powerful yet lightweight model. Secondly, we identify two challenges when building such a lightweight but unified expert model. They are: structural variability across levels and semantic entanglement between textual and formulaic content. To tackle these, we introduce a hierarchical supervision training that explicitly guides structural comprehension, and a semantic-decoupled tokenizer that separates text and formula representations. Finally, we develop a comprehensive evaluation benchmark covering Chinese and English documents from multiple domains and with multiple levels. Experimental results on this and public benchmarks demonstrate that UniRec-0.1B outperforms both general-purpose VLMs and leading document parsing expert models, while achieving 2-9x speedup, validating its effectiveness and efficiency. Codebase and Dataset: https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR.