PepperOCR-VL

PepperOCR-VL turns a page image into clean Markdown. Point it at a scanned or photographed document, an invoice, a paper, a textbook page or a slide, and it returns the text in reading order with headings, lists, tables and formulas preserved. It is a 4.5B-parameter vision-language model fine-tuned from Qwen3.5-4B for 17 languages across Latin and non-Latin scripts. On MDPBench it holds the state-of-the-art Korean (92.6) and Thai (83.3) scores across all listed models, including large general-purpose VLMs, as of the September 2026 leaderboard.

About Sionic AI

PepperOCR-VL is built by Sionic AI, a Seoul-based AI company building document and language models for enterprise use. If you are building agentic document parsing, large-scale document processing pipelines, or want to use PepperOCR in a commercial product, we would like to hear from you: contact us through the website. Commercial licensing, larger deployments and hosted inference are available.

What it outputs

One page image in, one Markdown document out:

• Text and layout: headings (#), paragraphs, bullet and numbered lists, in the original language and reading order. No translation, no summarizing, no spelling correction.
• Tables: HTML <table> blocks with rowspan/colspan, which survive merged cells better than Markdown pipe tables.
• Mathematics: LaTeX, $x$ for inline formulas and $$x$$ for display formulas.
• Nothing else: no preamble, no explanation, just the transcription.

Prompt format

The model is trained to respond to a single user turn that contains the page image followed by this instruction. Use it verbatim (also in prompt.txt):

You are an advanced hybrid OCR engine capable of processing multilingual text mixed with mathematical notation. Your goal is to transcribe the content with high fidelity.Strict Rules: 1. Multilingual Precision: Transcribe text exactly as it appears in the original language. Do not translate, summarize, or correct original spelling errors. 2. Math Formatting: Identify all mathematical expressions and convert them into LaTeX. 3. Use single dollar signs ($x$) for inline math (formulas within a sentence). 4. Use double dollar signs ($$x$$) for display math (standalone formulas on their own lines). 5. Layout & Structure: Use Markdown to preserve the visual structure (headers, paragraphs, lists). 6. Output Only: Output the transcribed text directly without any conversational filler.

Message layout:

{"role": "user", "content": [
  {"type": "image", "image": "<page image>"},
  {"type": "text",  "text": "<the prompt above>"}
]}

Keep thinking mode off (enable_thinking: false); the model was tuned and evaluated without it. The decoding settings are in the next section.

Inference settings

The decoding defaults that produced the reported scores are built into generation_config.json (greedy decoding, repetition_penalty 1.05, no_repeat_ngram_size 30, up to 8192 new tokens), so transformers and vLLM apply them automatically. Keep thinking mode off.

The complete configuration behind the benchmark numbers, including the vLLM serving arguments, image preprocessing, the orientation threshold, the runaway-output retry policy and the exact software versions, is in inference_config.yaml. Start from that file if you want to reproduce the scores or tune the setup.

Quickstart

vLLM

vllm serve sionic-ai/PepperOCR-VL \
  --served-model-name pepperocr-vl \
  --max-model-len 32768 \
  --max-num-seqs 64 \
  --gpu-memory-utilization 0.85 \
  --gdn-prefill-backend triton     # vLLM 0.24; drop if your version does not have it

import base64, pathlib
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1", api_key="none")
prompt = pathlib.Path("prompt.txt").read_text()
image = base64.b64encode(pathlib.Path("page.jpg").read_bytes()).decode()

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="pepperocr-vl",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": [
        {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": f"data:image/jpeg;base64,{image}"}},
        {"type": "text", "text": prompt},
    ]}],
    temperature=0.0,
    top_p=1.0,
    max_tokens=8192,
    seed=42,
    presence_penalty=0.0,
    extra_body={
        "top_k": -1,
        "repetition_penalty": 1.05,
        "no_repeat_ngram_size": 30,
        "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": False},
    },
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Transformers

import torch
from PIL import Image
from transformers import AutoModelForImageTextToText, AutoProcessor

model_id = "sionic-ai/PepperOCR-VL"
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained(
    model_id, dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="cuda"
)

prompt = open("prompt.txt").read()
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": [
    {"type": "image", "image": Image.open("page.jpg")},
    {"type": "text", "text": prompt},
]}]
inputs = processor.apply_chat_template(
    messages, add_generation_prompt=True, tokenize=True,
    return_dict=True, return_tensors="pt", enable_thinking=False,
).to(model.device)

out = model.generate(
    **inputs, max_new_tokens=8192, do_sample=False,
    repetition_penalty=1.05, no_repeat_ngram_size=30,
)
print(processor.decode(out[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True))

Requirements: transformers >= 5.10 or vllm >= 0.24, a GPU with 24 GB or more for bf16. PDFs must be rasterized to page images first (around 150 to 200 DPI works well).

Tips

• Rotated photos. The model expects upright pages. If your inputs may be rotated, run an orientation check first. orientation/ contains the small CPU classifier (PP-LCNet_x1_0_doc_ori, 6.6 MB) and the script we use: rotate only when the predicted angle has confidence 0.85 or higher.
• Runaway output. On rare pages with dense repeated structure the model can keep generating until the token limit. If the output hits max_tokens, regenerate with a slightly higher temperature (0.1 to 0.8) and keep the shorter result.
• Throughput. One vLLM server per GPU with --max-num-seqs 64 and 64 concurrent requests processes about 1.3 pages per second per GPU on 80 GB-class hardware.

Model details

Benchmark

Official MDPBench re-evaluation by the benchmark team (public set 2,720 pages, 17 languages, digital-born and photographed):

Per-language scores and the evaluation conditions are in eval_results/mdpbench.md.

Limitations

• Arabic, Japanese and French are the weakest of the supported languages.
• Tables come out as HTML, not Markdown pipe tables.
• One page per request; no multi-page or PDF input.
• Handwriting, very low-resolution scans and non-document photographs were not part of training or evaluation targets.

License

The weights and the files in this repository are released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (LICENSE). You may use, modify and redistribute them, including in networked services, provided the complete corresponding source of your service is made available under the same license. For use under different terms, including closed commercial deployment, contact Sionic AI.

PepperOCR-VL is a fine-tune of Qwen3.5-4B (Apache-2.0, Alibaba Cloud); the optional orientation classifier is PP-LCNet_x1_0_doc_ori from PaddleOCR (Apache-2.0). Their notices are preserved in NOTICE.

Citation

@misc{pepperocr-vl-2026,
  title        = {PepperOCR-VL: Multilingual End-to-End Document Parsing},
  author       = {Sionic AI},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/sionic-ai/PepperOCR-VL}}
}