MonkeyOCRv2: A Visual-Text Foundation Model for Document AI
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| Authors | Yuliang Liu et al. |
| Year | 2026 |
| HF Upvotes | 15 |
| arXiv | 2607.11562 |
| Download | |
| HF Page | View on Hugging Face |
Abstract
Mainstream visual encoders are pretrained on natural images and cannot be effectively applied to document images without document-oriented adaptation, as dense text and fine-grained character strokes demand character-level visual perception. We present MonkeyOCRv2, a visual-text pretrained model for document AI. First, we construct MonkeyDoc v2, to our knowledge the largest document-image pretraining corpus, comprising 113 million images spanning 17 languages. Second, we propose a pretraining strategy that jointly learns image-to-text generation and pixel-level document reconstruction: the former aligns visual representations with textual content, while the latter preserves character strokes and layout details. Extensive experiments are conducted on five representative document analysis tasks, including text recognition, formula recognition, text detection, document tampering detection, and overlapping text segmentation. Replacing the original encoders with MonkeyOCRv2 consistently improves performance across all five tasks. Finally, we validate its effectiveness as the vision encoder of multimodal large language models on the more challenging tasks of document parsing and document understanding. Kept frozen and paired with a lightweight language model, it yields a 0.7B document parsing model that sets a new open-source state-of-the-art on MDPBench, a recent benchmark spanning digital-born and photographed documents across 17 languages, surpassing the previous best 3B dots.mocr by 2.8% absolute with a vision encoder roughly 11times smaller. The frozen encoder also powers a document understanding model that outperforms counterparts built on CLIP, DINO, and SAM across eight benchmarks under identical training settings. These results suggest that document-oriented visual pretraining can serve as a foundation for document intelligence in its own right.
Engineering Breakdown
The Problem
Mainstream visual encoders are pretrained on natural images and cannot be effectively applied to document images without document-oriented adaptation, as dense text and fine-grained character strokes demand character-level visual perception.
The Approach
We present MonkeyOCRv2, a visual-text pretrained model for document AI. Second, we propose a pretraining strategy that jointly learns image-to-text generation and pixel-level document reconstruction: the former aligns visual representations with textual content, while the latter preserves character strokes and layout details.
Key Results
Kept frozen and paired with a lightweight language model, it yields a 0.7B document parsing model that sets a new open-source state-of-the-art on MDPBench, a recent benchmark spanning digital-born and photographed documents across 17 languages, surpassing the previous best 3B dots.mocr by 2.8% absolute with a vision encoder roughly 11times smaller.
Research Areas
This paper contributes to the following areas of AI/ML engineering:
- Machine learning
- Deep learning
- Neural networks
- Model optimization
- AI systems
- Monkeyocrv2
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