Unlimited OCR Works
On the map: Efficient LLM inference and serving → KV cache optimization
Abstract (arXiv)
Recently, end-to-end OCR models, exemplified by DeepSeek OCR, have once again thrust OCR into the spotlight. A widely held view is that employing a large language model (LLM) as the decoder allows the model to leverage the prior distribution of language, leading to improved OCR performance. However, the downside is equally evident: as the output sequence lengthens, the accumulated KV cache drives up memory consumption and progressively slows down generation. This stands in stark contrast to humans, who exhibit no such decline in efficiency during long-horizon copying tasks. In this technical report, we propose Unlimited OCR, a model designed to emulate human parsing working memory. Taking DeepSeek OCR as the baseline, we replace all attention layers in the decoder with our proposed Reference Sliding Window Attention (R-SWA), which reduces attention computation costs while maintaining a constant KV cache throughout the entire decoding process. By combining the high compression rate of DeepSeek OCR's encoder with our constant KV cache design, Unlimited OCR can transcribe dozens of pages of documents in a single forward pass under a standard maximum length of 32K. More importantly, R-SWA is a general-purpose parsing attention mechanism - beyond OCR, it is equally applicable to tasks such as ASR, translation, etc. Codes and model weights are publicly available at http://github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in KV cache optimization, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving. Builds on 25 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2026.
Builds on
25 of 27 references.
References · 25
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,234
- 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,137
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
- 2016SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restartscited by 5,045
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
- 2023Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyondcited by 2,224
- 2019Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelismcited by 1,868
- 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,834
- 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiencycited by 1,510
- 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 815
- 2024MinerU: An Open-Source Solution for Precise Document Content Extractioncited by 267
13 more
- 2023Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documentscited by 245
- 2025DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compressioncited by 183
- 2024General OCR Theory: Towards OCR-2.0 via a Unified End-to-end Modelcited by 180
- 2024OmniDocBench: Benchmarking Diverse PDF Document Parsing with Comprehensive Annotationscited by 150
- 2025olmOCR: Unlocking Trillions of Tokens in PDFs with Vision Language Modelscited by 125
- 2025PaddleOCR-VL: Boosting Multilingual Document Parsing via a 0.9B Ultra-Compact Vision-Language Modelcited by 89
- 2025MonkeyOCR: Document Parsing with a Structure-Recognition-Relation Triplet Paradigmcited by 87
- 2025Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Promptingcited by 79
- 2026DeepSeek-OCR 2: Visual Causal Flowcited by 74
- 2025POINTS-Reader: Distillation-Free Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Document Conversioncited by 34
- 2026STEP3-VL-10B Technical Reportcited by 32
- 2026Qianfan-OCR: A Unified End-to-End Model for Document Intelligencecited by 21
- 2026FireRed-OCR Technical Reportcited by 13
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.
8 papers.
- 2026HunyuanOCR-1.5: Making Lightweight OCR VLMs Faster and Bettercited by 14
- 2026OvisOCR2 Technical Reportcited by 5
- 2026Can OCR-VLMs Read Devanagari? A Stress-Test Benchmark and Post-Correction Studycited by 0
- 2026HPD-Parsing: Hierarchical Parallel Document Parsingcited by 0
- 2026WildHandBench: A Benchmark for Handwritten Text Understanding that Challenges MLLMs and Humanscited by 0
- 2026DocMIDE: Learning Multi-Hop Implicit Derivation in Visually Rich Documentscited by 0
- 2026From PDF to Evidence: Structure-Aware Retrieval for Clinical Practice Guidelinescited by 0
- 2026Xiaomi-OCR-0 Technical Reportcited by 0
- 2026Xiaomi-OCR-0 Technical Report28 Sep 2026
- 2026From PDF to Evidence: Structure-Aware Retrieval for Clinical Practice Guidelines27 Sep 2026
- 2026DocMIDE: Learning Multi-Hop Implicit Derivation in Visually Rich Documents21 Sep 2026
- 2026WildHandBench: A Benchmark for Handwritten Text Understanding that Challenges MLLMs and Humans24 Aug 2026
- 2026HPD-Parsing: Hierarchical Parallel Document Parsing21 Jul 2026
- 2026OvisOCR2 Technical Report15 Jul 2026
- 2026HunyuanOCR-1.5: Making Lightweight OCR VLMs Faster and Better6 Jul 2026
- 2026Can OCR-VLMs Read Devanagari? A Stress-Test Benchmark and Post-Correction Study28 Jun 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Visual Merit or Linguistic Crutch? A Close Look at DeepSeek-OCR
- 2024A Simple and Effective L2 Norm-Based Strategy for KV Cache Compression
- 2025Context Cascade Compression: Exploring the Upper Limits of Text Compression
- 2026Jina-OCR-v1: Efficient Document Parsing with Speculative Decoding and Dense Verifiable Rewards
- 2026FastOCR: Dynamic Visual Fixation via KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Document Parsing
- 2026From Retrieval to Recognition:How Vision--Language Models Become OCR Specialists
- 2026RTPrune: Reading-Twice Inspired Token Pruning for Efficient DeepSeek-OCR Inference
- 2026Hierarchical Adaptive Eviction for KV Cache Management in Multimodal Language Models