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GLM-OCR – A multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding

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Re: GLM-OCR – A multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding

#2
This is actually the thing I really desperately need. I'm routinely analyzing contracts that were faxed to me, scanned with monstrously poor resolution, wet signed, all kinds of shit. The big LLM providers choke on this raw input and I burn up the entire context window for 30 pages of text. Understandable evals of the quality of these OCR systems (which are moving wicked fast) would be helpful...

And here's the kicker. I can't afford mistakes. Missing a single character or misinterpreting it could be catastrophic. 4 units vacant? 10 days to respond? Signature missing? Incredibly critical things. I can't find an eval that gives me confidence around this.

Re: GLM-OCR – A multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding

#3
There are a bunch of new OCR models.

I’ve also heard very good things about these two in particular:

- LightOnOCR-2-1B: https://huggingface.co/lightonai/LightOnOCR-2-1B

- PaddleOCR-VL-1.5: https://huggingface.co/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR-VL-1.5

The OCR leaderboards I’ve seen leave a lot to be desired.

With the rapid release of so many of these models, I wish there were a better way to know which ones are actually the best.

I also feel like most/all of these models don’t handle charts, other than to maybe include a link to a cropped image. It would be nice for the OCR model to also convert charts into markdown tables, but this is obviously challenging.

Re: GLM-OCR – A multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding

#4
post #2

This is actually the thing I really desperately need. I'm routinely analyzing contracts that were faxed to me, scanned with monstrously poor resolution, wet signed, all kinds of shit. The big LLM providers choke on this raw input and I burn up the entire context window for 30 pages of text. Understandable evals of the quality of these OCR systems (which are moving wicked fast) would be helpful... And here's the kicke…

Deciphering fax messages? What is this, the 90s?

Re: GLM-OCR – A multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding

#5
post #2

This is actually the thing I really desperately need. I'm routinely analyzing contracts that were faxed to me, scanned with monstrously poor resolution, wet signed, all kinds of shit. The big LLM providers choke on this raw input and I burn up the entire context window for 30 pages of text. Understandable evals of the quality of these OCR systems (which are moving wicked fast) would be helpful... And here's the kicke…

If your needs are that sensitive, I doubt you'll find anything anytime soon that doesn't require a human in the loop. Even SOTA models only average 95% accuracy on messy inputs. If that's a per character accuracy (which OCR is generally measured by), that's going to be 5+ errors per page of 100+ words. If you really can't afford mistakes you have to consider the OCR inaccurate. If you have key components like "days to respond" and "units vacant" you need to identify the presence of those specifically with bias in favor of false positives (over false negatives), and human confirmation of the source-> OCR.

Re: GLM-OCR – A multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding

#6
post #2

This is actually the thing I really desperately need. I'm routinely analyzing contracts that were faxed to me, scanned with monstrously poor resolution, wet signed, all kinds of shit. The big LLM providers choke on this raw input and I burn up the entire context window for 30 pages of text. Understandable evals of the quality of these OCR systems (which are moving wicked fast) would be helpful... And here's the kicke…

If you want OCR with the big LLM providers, you should probably be passing one page per request. Having the model focus on OCR for only a single page at a time seemed to help a lot in my anecdotal testing a few months ago. You can even pass all the pages in parallel in separate requests, and get the better quality response much faster too.

But, as others said, if you can't afford mistakes, then you're going to need a human in the loop to take responsibility.

Re: GLM-OCR – A multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding

#7
post #2

This is actually the thing I really desperately need. I'm routinely analyzing contracts that were faxed to me, scanned with monstrously poor resolution, wet signed, all kinds of shit. The big LLM providers choke on this raw input and I burn up the entire context window for 30 pages of text. Understandable evals of the quality of these OCR systems (which are moving wicked fast) would be helpful... And here's the kicke…

I'm keeping my eye on progress in this area as well. I need to free engineering design data from tens of thousands of PDF pages and make them easily and quickly accessible to LLMs.

Re: GLM-OCR – A multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding

#8
post #7
post #2

This is actually the thing I really desperately need. I'm routinely analyzing contracts that were faxed to me, scanned with monstrously poor resolution, wet signed, all kinds of shit. The big LLM providers choke on this raw input and I burn up the entire context window for 30 pages of text. Understandable evals of the quality of these OCR systems (which are moving wicked fast) would be helpful... And here's the kicke…

I'm keeping my eye on progress in this area as well. I need to free engineering design data from tens of thousands of PDF pages and make them easily and quickly accessible to LLMs.

All of healthcare is crying. Trust me.

Re: GLM-OCR – A multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding

#10
post #8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm keeping my eye on progress in this area as well. I need to free engineering design data from tens of thousands of PDF pages and make them easily and quickly accessible to LLMs.

All of healthcare is crying. Trust me.

I suppose tears of joy?
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