DeepSeek-OCR
Vision-language OCR model that compresses document pages into compact visual tokens for LLM ingestion.
About
Context compression, not just text recognition, is the research question behind DeepSeek-OCR: the model explores how far a vision encoder can compress a document page into a small number of visual tokens that a language model can still decode into faithful markdown. Resolution tiers span Tiny at 512x512 (64 vision tokens) through Large at 1280x1280 (400 tokens), plus a dynamic Gundam mode that mixes tile sizes for dense pages. Inference is built for scale: running under vLLM, the repository reports roughly 2,500 tokens per second on an A100-40G when batching PDF pages. The reference setup targets Python 3.12 with PyTorch 2.6 and CUDA 11.8 or newer, and an NVIDIA GPU is required. Code and weights are MIT licensed, so commercial use is unrestricted, and the repository collected about 23,700 stars after its October 2025 release; a DeepSeek-OCR2 follow-up landed in January 2026 in its own repository. Teams building LLM data pipelines use it to convert large document archives into training and RAG corpora cheaply.
Should you use DeepSeek-OCR?
Pick it when
Use DeepSeek-OCR when you are converting a large document archive into LLM training or RAG data on NVIDIA GPUs, want MIT-licensed weights for commercial use, and care about how many visual tokens each page costs.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you lack an NVIDIA GPU or want a packaged toolkit rather than a research model: the reference setup pins Python 3.12, PyTorch 2.6, and CUDA 11.8 or newer. Docling or PaddleOCR are easier to run day to day.
Alternatives to DeepSeek-OCR
- dots.ocr
Also MIT weights, but returns bounding boxes with layout categories in one pass, which helps when you need page structure rather than compressed markdown.
- olmOCR
Apache-2.0 pipeline built for million-page batch runs with S3 cluster support, using a larger 7B model instead of aggressive token compression.
- GOT-OCR
Unified model with community GGUF and ONNX ports for lighter hardware, but its training data carries CC-BY-NC terms versus DeepSeek-OCR's clean MIT.
- PaddleOCR
Runs without a GPU and has mature PP-OCR and table modules, trading a VLM's whole-page markdown for a more traditional, easier to deploy pipeline.
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Details
- Category
- OCR & Document Processing
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- MIT
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026