OCR UV Scripts

Part of uv-scripts — self-contained UV scripts you run on Hugging Face Jobs in one command.

A model zoo of OCR scripts — one per model — that add a markdown column to an image dataset. Pick a model from the table below, point it at your dataset, and run it on a GPU with one command. Two companions sit alongside: pp-doclayout.py detects layout regions (bboxes for text/title/table/figure/…) instead of text, and ocr-vllm-judge.py compares model outputs head-to-head.

Quick Start

Run OCR on any dataset without needing your own GPU:

# Quick test with 10 samples
hf jobs uv run --flavor l4x1 \
    --secrets HF_TOKEN \
    https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr/raw/main/glm-ocr.py \
    your-input-dataset your-output-dataset \
    --max-samples 10

This will:

• Process the first 10 images from your dataset
• Add OCR results as a new markdown column
• Push the results to a new dataset
• View results at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/[your-output-dataset]

Models at a glance

Start here: for a quick first run, try lighton-ocr2.py (1B, very fast) or paddleocr-vl-1.6.py (0.9B, current OmniDocBench SOTA); for the smallest footprint, falcon-ocr.py (0.3B, strong on tables). Reach for a 7–8B model only when quality demands it. Several of these models sit on the public olmOCR-Bench — pull the live ranking from your terminal in one command:

hf datasets leaderboard allenai/olmOCR-bench

But which model wins on your documents is still document-dependent — so ocr-bench builds a per-collection leaderboard for your own data (pairwise VLM-as-judge, optionally human-validated), using these scripts under the hood.

Sorted by model size:

Script	Model	Size	Backend	Notes
falcon-ocr.py	Falcon-OCR	0.3B	falcon-perception	Smallest in collection. #1 on multi-column docs and tables (olmOCR), Apache 2.0
smoldocling-ocr.py	SmolDocling	256M	Transformers	DocTags structured output
glm-ocr.py	GLM-OCR	0.9B	vLLM	94.62% OmniDocBench V1.5
paddleocr-vl.py	PaddleOCR-VL	0.9B	Transformers	4 task modes (ocr/table/formula/chart)
paddleocr-vl-1.5.py	PaddleOCR-VL-1.5	0.9B	Transformers	94.5% OmniDocBench, 6 task modes
paddleocr-vl-1.6.py	PaddleOCR-VL-1.6	0.9B	vLLM	96.33% OmniDocBench v1.6 (SOTA), drop-in upgrade of 1.5
lighton-ocr.py	LightOnOCR-1B	1B	vLLM	Fast, 3 vocab sizes
lighton-ocr2.py	LightOnOCR-2-1B	1B	vLLM	7× faster than v1, RLVR trained
hunyuan-ocr.py	HunyuanOCR	1B	vLLM	Lightweight VLM
dots-ocr.py	DoTS.ocr	1.7B	vLLM	100+ languages
firered-ocr.py	FireRed-OCR	2.1B	vLLM	Qwen3-VL fine-tune, Apache 2.0
abot-ocr.py	ABot-OCR	2B	vLLM	Qwen3-VL based, doc→Markdown (text/LaTeX/HTML tables). Needs vllm/vllm-openai image. paper
nanonets-ocr.py	Nanonets-OCR-s	2B	vLLM	LaTeX, tables, forms
dots-mocr.py	dots.mocr	3B	vLLM	8 prompt modes incl. SVG generation, layout + bbox, 100+ languages
nanonets-ocr2.py	Nanonets-OCR2-3B	3B	vLLM	Next-gen, Qwen2.5-VL base
deepseek-ocr-vllm.py	DeepSeek-OCR	4B	vLLM	5 resolution + 5 prompt modes
deepseek-ocr.py	DeepSeek-OCR	4B	Transformers	Same model, Transformers backend
deepseek-ocr2-vllm.py	DeepSeek-OCR-2	3B	vLLM	Newer, requires nightly vLLM
nuextract3.py	NuExtract3	4B	vLLM	Markdown OCR + schema-guided JSON extraction (template/Pydantic). Needs vllm/vllm-openai image
qianfan-ocr.py	Qianfan-OCR	4.7B	vLLM	#1 OmniDocBench v1.5 (93.12), Layout-as-Thought, 192 languages
olmocr2-vllm.py	olmOCR-2-7B	7B	vLLM	82.4% olmOCR-Bench
rolm-ocr.py	RolmOCR	7B	vLLM	Qwen2.5-VL based, general-purpose
numarkdown-ocr.py	NuMarkdown-8B	8B	vLLM	Reasoning-based OCR

Variants & tools (same models, different I/O): glm-ocr-v2.py adds checkpoint/resume for very large jobs · glm-ocr-bucket.py and falcon-ocr-bucket.py read images/PDFs from a mounted bucket and write one .md per page · ocr-vllm-judge.py runs pairwise OCR-quality comparisons.

Layout detection (not OCR)

pp-doclayout.py runs PaddleOCR's PP-DocLayout-L (or M / S / plus-L) and emits per-image bounding boxes + region classes (text, title, table, figure, formula, list, header, footer, ...) — it does NOT extract text. Useful for filtering pages, cropping regions for downstream OCR, dataset analysis, and training-data prep.

Script	Model	Size	Backend	Notes
pp-doclayout.py	PP-DocLayout-L	123M	paddleocr	Layout bboxes (no text). Bucket support: incremental parquet shards, resumable.

hf jobs uv run --flavor l4x1 -s HF_TOKEN \
    https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr/raw/main/pp-doclayout.py \
    your-dataset your-layout-output --max-samples 10

Source/sink can be either an HF dataset repo OR an hf://buckets/... URL (auto-detected). Bucket output writes incremental zstd parquet shards via the buckets API — resumable across runs (snapshot-backed source listing) and no git/commit overhead. See the script's --help for all flags.

Common Options

The scripts aim to expose a consistent interface: every OCR model script takes input-dataset output-dataset as positional arguments, accepts the shared core flags below, and writes a markdown column — so switching models is usually just swapping the script URL. Models differ where they need to, though: some add their own flags (task modes, resolution presets, --think, vocab sizes), a few need a specific Docker image, and per-model defaults (batch size, context length, temperature) are tuned to each model card. Always check a script's --help for its specifics.

Option	Description
--image-column	Column containing images (default: image)
--output-column	Output column name (default: markdown)
--split	Dataset split (default: train)
--max-samples	Limit number of samples (useful for testing)
--private	Make output dataset private
--shuffle	Shuffle dataset before processing
--seed	Random seed for shuffling (default: 42)
--batch-size	Images per batch (default varies per model)
--max-model-len	Max context length (default varies per model)
--max-tokens	Max output tokens (default varies per model)
--gpu-memory-utilization	GPU memory fraction (default: 0.8)
--config	Config name for Hub push (for benchmarking)
--create-pr	Push as PR instead of direct commit
--verbose	Log resolved package versions after run

Every script supports --help to see all available options:

uv run glm-ocr.py --help

NuExtract3: markdown OCR + structured extraction

NuExtract3 (4B, Apache-2.0) is the one script here that does both document-to-markdown OCR and schema-guided JSON extraction. Give it a template (or a JSON Schema / Pydantic model) and it returns JSON shaped to match.

Run it with the vllm/vllm-openai image. NuExtract3's Qwen3.5 architecture needs the image's prebuilt CUDA kernels — the default uv-script image lacks nvcc, so flashinfer's JIT compile fails at engine warmup. Use --image vllm/vllm-openai:latest --python /usr/bin/python3 -e PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages on a100-large.

# Markdown OCR (default mode)
hf jobs uv run --flavor a100-large \
    --image vllm/vllm-openai:latest \
    --python /usr/bin/python3 \
    -e PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages \
    -s HF_TOKEN \
    https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr/raw/main/nuextract3.py \
    my-documents my-markdown --max-samples 10

# Structured extraction with an inline template
hf jobs uv run --flavor a100-large \
    --image vllm/vllm-openai:latest \
    --python /usr/bin/python3 \
    -e PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages \
    -s HF_TOKEN \
    https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr/raw/main/nuextract3.py \
    receipts extracted \
    --template '{"store": "verbatim-string", "date": "date", "total": "number"}'

Templates (--template) and JSON Schemas (--schema) each accept inline JSON, a URL, or a file path, so a schema can be hosted once and reused. Add --enable-thinking for harder layouts (slower; reasoning trace stored in a <output-column>_reasoning column). Template field names act as the model's extraction instructions, so name them descriptively — overly leading names can prompt over-generation, so verify against a few examples.

Model-specific modes & flags

Beyond the shared flags, some models add their own. Run --help on any script for the full list; the common ones:

Script	Extra options
glm-ocr.py	--task ocr|formula|table
paddleocr-vl.py	--task-mode ocr|table|formula|chart
paddleocr-vl-1.5.py	--task-mode ocr|table|formula|chart|spotting|seal
paddleocr-vl-1.6.py	--task-mode ocr|table|formula
lighton-ocr.py	--vocab-size 151k|32k|16k (smaller = faster on European languages)
deepseek-ocr-vllm.py	--resolution-mode tiny|small|base|large|gundam, --prompt-mode document|image|free|figure|describe; pass -e UV_TORCH_BACKEND=auto
dots-ocr.py	--prompt-mode ocr|layout-all|layout-only
dots-mocr.py	--prompt-mode (8: ocr, layout-all, layout-only, web-parsing, scene-spotting, grounding-ocr, svg, general); SVG: --model rednote-hilab/dots.mocr-svg --prompt-mode svg
qianfan-ocr.py	--prompt-mode ocr|table|formula|chart|scene|kie, --think (Layout-as-Thought); kie needs --custom-prompt
numarkdown-ocr.py	--include-thinking (store the reasoning trace)
nuextract3.py	--template / --schema / --enable-thinking — see the NuExtract3 section above

Image-mode models — abot-ocr.py and nuextract3.py (Qwen3.5 architecture) need the vllm/vllm-openai image because the default uv-script image lacks nvcc. Add --image vllm/vllm-openai:latest --python /usr/bin/python3 -e PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages (see the NuExtract3 example above for the full command).

Output & features

• Markdown column — each run adds an --output-column (default markdown) with the OCR result.
• Multi-model comparison — every script records inference_info, so you can run several models into the same dataset and compare. Point a second model at the same output repo:

  uv run rolm-ocr.py     my-dataset my-dataset --max-samples 100
  uv run nanonets-ocr.py my-dataset my-dataset --max-samples 100   # appends
  

• Reproducible sampling — --shuffle (with --seed, default 42) draws a representative sample instead of the first N rows.
• Automatic dataset cards — every run writes a card with the model config, processing stats, column descriptions, and a reproduction command.

More examples

# DeepSeek-OCR on historical scans, large resolution mode
hf jobs uv run --flavor a100-large -s HF_TOKEN -e UV_TORCH_BACKEND=auto \
    https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr/raw/main/deepseek-ocr-vllm.py \
    NationalLibraryOfScotland/Britain-and-UK-Handbooks-Dataset out \
    --max-samples 100 --shuffle --resolution-mode large

# dots.mocr — SVG generation from charts/figures
hf jobs uv run --flavor l4x1 -s HF_TOKEN \
    https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr/raw/main/dots-mocr.py \
    your-charts svg-output --prompt-mode svg --model rednote-hilab/dots.mocr-svg

# Qianfan — key-information extraction
hf jobs uv run --flavor l4x1 -s HF_TOKEN \
    https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr/raw/main/qianfan-ocr.py \
    invoices extracted-fields \
    --prompt-mode kie --custom-prompt "Extract: name, date, total. Output as JSON."

Python API:

from huggingface_hub import run_uv_job

job = run_uv_job(
    "https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr/raw/main/nanonets-ocr.py",
    args=["input-dataset", "output-dataset", "--batch-size", "16"],
    flavor="l4x1",
)

Run locally (needs your own GPU) — same scripts, run directly from the URL:

uv run https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr/raw/main/glm-ocr.py \
    input-dataset output-dataset

---

Works with any Hugging Face dataset containing images — documents, forms, receipts, books, handwriting.