Note. 🚀 LightOnOCR-2 is now available and state-of-the-art on OlmOCR-bench, with new image detection variants! Check it out here: lightonai/LightOnOCR-2-1B
Full BF16 version of the model. We recommend this variant for inference and further fine-tuning.
LightOnOCR-1B is a compact, end-to-end vision–language model for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and document understanding. It achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in its weight class while being several times faster and cheaper than larger general-purpose VLMs.
LightOnOCR combines a Vision Transformer encoder(Pixtral-based) with a lightweight text decoder(Qwen3-based) distilled from high-quality open VLMs. It is optimized for document parsing tasks, producing accurate, layout-aware text extraction from high-resolution pages.
[2025/11/24] 🚀 LightOnOCR is now officially supported in vLLM v0.11.1 🚀
uv venv --python 3.12 --seed
source .venv/bin/activate
# install any version higher than 0.11.1
uv pip install vllm==0.11.2
# extra deps need only to run the example below
uv pip install pypdfium2 pillow requests
@misc{lightonocr2025,
title = {LightOnOCR-1B: End-to-End and Efficient Domain-Specific Vision-Language Models for OCR},
author = {Said Taghadouini and Baptiste Aubertin and Adrien Cavaillès},
year = {2025},
howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/blog/lightonai/lightonocr}}
}
Files
17 files · 2.34 GBWeights 2.32 GB (safetensors). Sizes and sha256 from the signed manifest.