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Show HN: Qwen-2.5-32B is now the best open source OCR model

(github.com)
208 points themanmaran | 1 comments | 01 Apr 25 17:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.235s | source

Last week was big for open source LLMs. We got:

- Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b)

- Gemma-3 (27b)

- DeepSeek-v3-0324

And a couple weeks ago we got the new mistral-ocr model. We updated our OCR benchmark to include the new models.

We evaluated 1,000 documents for JSON extraction accuracy. Major takeaways:

- Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) are by far the most impressive. Both landed right around 75% accuracy (equivalent to GPT-4o’s performance). Qwen 72b was only 0.4% above 32b. Within the margin of error.

- Both Qwen models passed mistral-ocr (72.2%), which is specifically trained for OCR.

- Gemma-3 (27B) only scored 42.9%. Particularly surprising given that it's architecture is based on Gemini 2.0 which still tops the accuracy chart.

The data set and benchmark runner is fully open source. You can check out the code and reproduction steps here:

- https://getomni.ai/blog/benchmarking-open-source-models-for-...

- https://github.com/getomni-ai/benchmark

- https://huggingface.co/datasets/getomni-ai/ocr-benchmark

1. jauntywundrkind ◴[01 Apr 25 20:31 UTC] No.43551006[source]▶
The 32b sounds like it has some useful small tweakers. Tweaks to make output more human friendly, better mathematical reasoning, better fine-grained understanding. https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2.5-vl-32b/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43464068

Qwen2.5-VL-72b was released two months ago (to little fanfare in submissions, i think, but some very enthusiastic comments such as rabid enthusiasm for handwriting recognition) already very interesting. Its actually one of the releases that kind of turned me on to AI, that broke through some of my skepticism & grumpiness. There's pretty good release notes detailing capabilities here; well done blog post. https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2.5-vl/

One thing that really piqued my interest was Qwen HTML output, where it can provide bounding boxes in HTML format for its output. That really closes the loop interestingly to me, makes the output something I can imagine quickly building useful visual feedback around, or using the structured data from easily. I can't imagine an easier to use output format.