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Main Authors: Poznanski, Jake, Rangapur, Aman, Borchardt, Jon, Dunkelberger, Jason, Huff, Regan, Lin, Daniel, Wilhelm, Christopher, Lo, Kyle, Soldaini, Luca
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18443
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author Poznanski, Jake
Rangapur, Aman
Borchardt, Jon
Dunkelberger, Jason
Huff, Regan
Lin, Daniel
Rangapur, Aman
Wilhelm, Christopher
Lo, Kyle
Soldaini, Luca
author_facet Poznanski, Jake
Rangapur, Aman
Borchardt, Jon
Dunkelberger, Jason
Huff, Regan
Lin, Daniel
Rangapur, Aman
Wilhelm, Christopher
Lo, Kyle
Soldaini, Luca
contents PDF documents have the potential to provide trillions of novel, high-quality tokens for training language models. However, these documents come in a diversity of types with differing formats and visual layouts that pose a challenge when attempting to extract and faithfully represent the underlying content for language model use. Traditional open source tools often produce lower quality extractions compared to vision language models (VLMs), but reliance on the best VLMs can be prohibitively costly (e.g., over 6,240 USD per million PDF pages for GPT-4o) or infeasible if the PDFs cannot be sent to proprietary APIs. We present olmOCR, an open-source toolkit for processing PDFs into clean, linearized plain text in natural reading order while preserving structured content like sections, tables, lists, equations, and more. Our toolkit runs a fine-tuned 7B vision language model (VLM) trained on olmOCR-mix-0225, a sample of 260,000 pages from over 100,000 crawled PDFs with diverse properties, including graphics, handwritten text and poor quality scans. olmOCR is optimized for large-scale batch processing, able to scale flexibly to different hardware setups and can convert a million PDF pages for only 176 USD. To aid comparison with existing systems, we also introduce olmOCR-Bench, a curated set of 1,400 PDFs capturing many content types that remain challenging even for the best tools and VLMs, including formulas, tables, tiny fonts, old scans, and more. We find olmOCR outperforms even top VLMs including GPT-4o, Gemini Flash 2 and Qwen-2.5-VL. We openly release all components of olmOCR: our fine-tuned VLM model, training code and data, an efficient inference pipeline that supports vLLM and SGLang backends, and benchmark olmOCR-Bench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_18443
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle olmOCR: Unlocking Trillions of Tokens in PDFs with Vision Language Models
Poznanski, Jake
Rangapur, Aman
Borchardt, Jon
Dunkelberger, Jason
Huff, Regan
Lin, Daniel
Rangapur, Aman
Wilhelm, Christopher
Lo, Kyle
Soldaini, Luca
Computation and Language
PDF documents have the potential to provide trillions of novel, high-quality tokens for training language models. However, these documents come in a diversity of types with differing formats and visual layouts that pose a challenge when attempting to extract and faithfully represent the underlying content for language model use. Traditional open source tools often produce lower quality extractions compared to vision language models (VLMs), but reliance on the best VLMs can be prohibitively costly (e.g., over 6,240 USD per million PDF pages for GPT-4o) or infeasible if the PDFs cannot be sent to proprietary APIs. We present olmOCR, an open-source toolkit for processing PDFs into clean, linearized plain text in natural reading order while preserving structured content like sections, tables, lists, equations, and more. Our toolkit runs a fine-tuned 7B vision language model (VLM) trained on olmOCR-mix-0225, a sample of 260,000 pages from over 100,000 crawled PDFs with diverse properties, including graphics, handwritten text and poor quality scans. olmOCR is optimized for large-scale batch processing, able to scale flexibly to different hardware setups and can convert a million PDF pages for only 176 USD. To aid comparison with existing systems, we also introduce olmOCR-Bench, a curated set of 1,400 PDFs capturing many content types that remain challenging even for the best tools and VLMs, including formulas, tables, tiny fonts, old scans, and more. We find olmOCR outperforms even top VLMs including GPT-4o, Gemini Flash 2 and Qwen-2.5-VL. We openly release all components of olmOCR: our fine-tuned VLM model, training code and data, an efficient inference pipeline that supports vLLM and SGLang backends, and benchmark olmOCR-Bench.
title olmOCR: Unlocking Trillions of Tokens in PDFs with Vision Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18443