# Dolphin-v2: Universal Document Parsing via Scalable Anchor Prompting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05384 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05384/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10302/) (2024)
- [LayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13318/) (2019)
- [LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/) (2022)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02349/) (2020)
- [LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14740/) (2020)
- [OCR-free Document Understanding Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15664/) (2021)
- [Kimi-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07491/) (2025)
- [Seed1.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07062/) (2025)
- [Monkey: Image Resolution and Text Label Are Important Things for Large Multi-modal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06607/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Patch n' Pack: NaViT, a Vision Transformer for any Aspect Ratio and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06304/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-DocOwl 1.5: Unified Structure Learning for OCR-free Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12895/) (2024)
- [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)
- [mPLUG-DocOwl: Modularized Multimodal Large Language Model for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02499/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [ClawGUI: A Unified Framework for Training, Evaluating, and Deploying GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11784/) (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)
- [MinerU-Popo: Universal Post-Processing Model for Structured Document Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24973/) (2026)
- [RT-DocLayout: Real-Time End-to-End Document Layout Analysis with Reading Order in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23344/) (2026)
- [P-MTP: Efficient Document Parsing via Multi-Token Prediction with Progressive Depth Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24447/) (2026)
- [MPDocBench-Parse: Benchmarking Practical Multi-page Document Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22100/) (2026)
- [Transmittance-Guided Structure-Texture Decomposition for Nighttime Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29507/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Awareness Adapters with Hybrid Pyramid Feature Fusion for Dense Depth Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03339/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Slicing-Assisted Hyper Inference for Enhanced Small Object Detection in High-Resolution Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19233/) (2026)
- [Feature Perturbation Pool-based Fusion Network for Unified Multi-Class Industrial Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19259/) (2026)
- [Lightweight Real-Time Rendering Parameter Optimization via XGBoost-Driven Lookup Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25178/) (2026)
- [Image Classification via Random Dilated Convolution with Multi-Branch Feature Extraction and Context Excitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25188/) (2026)
- [A Systematic Investigation of RL-Jailbreaking in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07032/) (2026)
- [Prefix-Adaptive Block Diffusion for Efficient Document Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16861/) (2026)
- [Do You Need Text Rectification? Soft Attention Mask Embedding for Rectification-Free Scene Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18173/) (2026)
- [HPD-Parsing: Hierarchical Parallel Document Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18839/) (2026)
- [Rank-Consistent Set Reasoning for Co-Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13706/) (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)
- [PolyOCR-Venus: Unified OCR Foundation Models for Text-Centric Visual Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37712/) (2026)
- [Read, Parse, Describe: Unified Document Parsing with Visual Element Description Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20335/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Document parsing has garnered widespread attention as vision-language models (VLMs) advance OCR capabilities. However, the field remains fragmented across dozens of specialized models with varying strengths, forcing users to navigate complex model selection and limiting system scalability. Moreover, existing two-stage approaches depend on axis-aligned bounding boxes for layout detection, failing to handle distorted or photographed documents effectively. To this end, we present Dolphin-v2, a two-stage document image parsing model that substantially improves upon the original Dolphin. In the first stage, Dolphin-v2 jointly performs document type classification (digital-born versus photographed) alongside layout analysis. For digital-born documents, it conducts finer-grained element detection with reading order prediction. In the second stage, we employ a hybrid parsing strategy: photographed documents are parsed holistically as complete pages to handle geometric distortions, while digital-born documents undergo element-wise parallel parsing guided by the detected layout anchors, enabling efficient content extraction. Compared with the original Dolphin, Dolphin-v2 introduces several crucial enhancements: (1) robust parsing of photographed documents via holistic page-level understanding, (2) finer-grained element detection (21 categories) with semantic attribute extraction such as author information and document metadata, and (3) code block recognition with indentation preservation, which existing systems typically lack. Comprehensive evaluations are conducted on DocPTBench, OmniDocBench, and our self-constructed RealDoc-160 benchmark. The results demonstrate substantial improvements: +14.78 points overall on the challenging OmniDocBench and 91% error reduction on photographed documents, while maintaining efficient inference through parallel processing.
