OCRia-1 Technical Report
We introduce OCRia-1, a 4B vision-language model (VLM) for document parsing that excels at preserving table structure, extracting chart data and retaining text formatting. OCRia-1 handles content that has traditionally been challenging in document parsing: merged cells and spanning headers, tables with thousands of cells, chart data, and meaningful text formatting such as bold, italics, subscripts and superscripts, preserving details needed for business-critical document analysis. At the time of this report, it achieves the highest scores on tables, charts and text formatting among the systems evaluated, including a 35B model and Mistral OCR 4.1. Its mean ParseBench score over the four dimensions we evaluate is 0.87, against 0.75 for the next-best system. We emphasize data quality and reward design in training OCRia-1. Synthetic pages provide exact ground truth for long tables and rich formatting, while real pages are transcribed using a pipeline grounded in the PDF text layer. We attribute OCRia-1's performance primarily to careful data curation that prioritizes quality and diversity over quantity. Dimension-specific rewards evaluate table reconstruction, chart-data extraction and text-formatting fidelity. We train the model on the curated data using supervised fine-tuning (SFT), then refine it through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). To our knowledge, OCRia-1 is the fastest published document-parsing VLM in its class, decoding at about 4,700 tokens per second with a single request on one B200 GPU, about nine times faster than the base model on stock vLLM. This is achieved through a block-diffusion speculator, quantization and custom kernels.