Multimodal OCR: Parse Anything from Documents
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
We present Multimodal OCR (MOCR), a document parsing paradigm that jointly parses text and graphics into unified textual representations. Unlike conventional OCR systems that focus on text recognition and leave graphical regions as cropped pixels, our method, termed dots.mocr, treats visual elements such as charts, diagrams, tables, and icons as first-class parsing targets, enabling systems to parse documents while preserving semantic relationships across elements. It offers several advantages: (1) it reconstructs both text and graphics as structured outputs, enabling more faithful document reconstruction; (2) it supports end-to-end training over heterogeneous document elements, allowing models to exploit semantic relations between textual and visual components; and (3) it converts previously discarded graphics into reusable code-level supervision, unlocking multimodal supervision embedded in existing documents. To make this paradigm practical at scale, we build a comprehensive data engine from PDFs, rendered webpages, and native SVG assets, and train a compact 3B-parameter model through staged pretraining and supervised fine-tuning. We evaluate dots.mocr from two perspectives: document parsing and structured graphics parsing. On document parsing benchmarks, it ranks second only to Gemini 3 Pro on our OCR Arena Elo leaderboard, surpasses existing open-source document parsing systems, and sets a new state of the art of 83.9 on olmOCR Bench. On structured graphics parsing, our model achieves higher reconstruction quality than Gemini 3 Pro across image-to-SVG benchmarks, demonstrating strong performance on charts, UI layouts, scientific figures, and chemical diagrams. These results show a scalable path toward building large-scale image-to-code corpora for multimodal pretraining. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/rednote-hilab/dots.mocr.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 41 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2026.
Builds on
41 of 45 references.
References · 41
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
- 2022ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoningcited by 1,449
- 2020DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Imagescited by 1,288
- 2016Modeling Context in Referring Expressionscited by 1,054
- 2016A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Imagescited by 793
- 2022LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Maskingcited by 481
- 2023OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Modelscited by 466
- 2021InfographicVQAcited by 430
- 2022Pix2Struct: Screenshot Parsing as Pretraining for Visual Language Understandingcited by 360
- 2019Image-based table recognition: data, model, and evaluationcited by 233
- 2024CharXiv: Charting Gaps in Realistic Chart Understanding in Multimodal LLMscited by 229
- 2023Teaching CLIP to Count to Tencited by 194
29 more
- 2024OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agentcited by 193
- 2024General OCR Theory: Towards OCR-2.0 via a Unified End-to-end Modelcited by 174
- 2025DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compressioncited by 174
- 2024TextMonkey: An OCR-Free Large Multimodal Model for Understanding Documentcited by 173
- 2024Design2Code: Benchmarking Multimodal Code Generation for Automated Front-End Engineeringcited by 146
- 2024OmniDocBench: Benchmarking Diverse PDF Document Parsing with Comprehensive Annotationscited by 144
- 2025PaddleOCR 3.0 Technical Reportcited by 136
- 2025olmOCR: Unlocking Trillions of Tokens in PDFs with Vision Language Modelscited by 120
- 2024ChartMimic: Evaluating LMM's Cross-Modal Reasoning Capability via Chart-to-Code Generationcited by 118
- 2017pix2code: Generating Code from a Graphical User Interface Screenshotcited by 113
- 2024mPLUG-DocOwl2: High-resolution Compressing for OCR-free Multi-page Document Understandingcited by 113
- 2025MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsingcited by 108
- 2023StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Textcited by 96
- 2025PaddleOCR-VL: Boosting Multilingual Document Parsing via a 0.9B Ultra-Compact Vision-Language Modelcited by 84
- 2025MonkeyOCR: Document Parsing with a Structure-Recognition-Relation Triplet Paradigmcited by 81
- 2025OmniSVG: A Unified Scalable Vector Graphics Generation Modelcited by 71
- 2026DeepSeek-OCR 2: Visual Causal Flowcited by 68
- 2026PaddleOCR-VL-1.5: Towards a Multi-Task 0.9B VLM for Robust In-the-Wild Document Parsingcited by 54
- 2025dots.ocr: Multilingual Document Layout Parsing in a Single Vision-Language Modelcited by 44
- 2024Image Over Text: Transforming Formula Recognition Evaluation with Character Detection Matchingcited by 39
- 2025OCR-Reasoning Benchmark: Unveiling the True Capabilities of MLLMs in Complex Text-Rich Image Reasoningcited by 25
- 2025GenExam: A Multidisciplinary Text-to-Image Examcited by 19
- 2025VinciCoder: Unifying Multimodal Code Generation via Coarse-to-fine Visual Reinforcement Learningcited by 18
- 2025Infinity Parser: Layout Aware Reinforcement Learning for Scanned Document Parsingcited by 17
- 2025ChartMaster: Advancing Chart-to-Code Generation with Real-World Charts and Chart Similarity Reinforcement Learningcited by 15
- 2025UniSVG: A Unified Dataset for Vector Graphic Understanding and Generation with Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 14
- 2026OCRVerse: Towards Holistic OCR in End-to-End Vision-Language Modelscited by 10
- 2026Scientific Image Synthesis: Benchmarking, Methodologies, and Downstream Utilitycited by 8
- 2025Benchmarking Document Parsers on Mathematical Formula Extraction from PDFscited by 4
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 12.
12 papers.
- 2026HunyuanOCR-1.5: Making Lightweight OCR VLMs Faster and Bettercited by 14
- 2026OvisOCR2 Technical Reportcited by 5
- 2026MDPBench: A Benchmark for Multilingual Document Parsing in Real-World Scenarioscited by 4
- 2026MonkeyOCRv2: A Visual-Text Foundation Model for Document AIcited by 4
- 2026ChartArena: Benchmarking Chart Parsing across Languages, Scenarios, and Formatscited by 2
- 2026PaDoc: Layout-Grounded Parallel Decoding for Document Parsingcited by 1
- 2026MPDocBench-Parse: Benchmarking Practical Multi-page Document Parsingcited by 0
- 2026When Low CER is Not Enough: An Analysis of Hallucinations in Vision-Language OCR Systems on Historical Uruguayan Documentscited by 0
- 2026One Patch Is Enough: Reinforcement-Optimized Visual Token Grounding for MLLM-Based Scene Text Spottingcited by 0
- 2026TeleOCR: Navigating Document Parsing Across Digital and Camera-Captured Documentscited by 0
- 2026WildHandBench: A Benchmark for Handwritten Text Understanding that Challenges MLLMs and Humanscited by 0
- 2026WeVisDoc: From Coverage to Capability for Robust End-to-End Document Parsingcited by 0
- 2026WeVisDoc: From Coverage to Capability for Robust End-to-End Document Parsing17 Sep 2026
- 2026WildHandBench: A Benchmark for Handwritten Text Understanding that Challenges MLLMs and Humans24 Aug 2026
- 2026TeleOCR: Navigating Document Parsing Across Digital and Camera-Captured Documents13 Aug 2026
- 2026PaDoc: Layout-Grounded Parallel Decoding for Document Parsing6 Aug 2026
- 2026One Patch Is Enough: Reinforcement-Optimized Visual Token Grounding for MLLM-Based Scene Text Spotting30 Jul 2026
- 2026When Low CER is Not Enough: An Analysis of Hallucinations in Vision-Language OCR Systems on Historical Uruguayan Documents27 Jul 2026
- 2026OvisOCR2 Technical Report15 Jul 2026
- 2026MonkeyOCRv2: A Visual-Text Foundation Model for Document AI13 Jul 2026
- 2026HunyuanOCR-1.5: Making Lightweight OCR VLMs Faster and Better6 Jul 2026
- 2026ChartArena: Benchmarking Chart Parsing across Languages, Scenarios, and Formats31 May 2026
- 2026MPDocBench-Parse: Benchmarking Practical Multi-page Document Parsing21 May 2026
- 2026MDPBench: A Benchmark for Multilingual Document Parsing in Real-World Scenarios30 Mar 2026