English

FireRed-OCR Technical Report

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-03 v1 Image and Video Processing

Abstract

We present FireRed-OCR, a systematic framework to specialize general VLMs into high-performance OCR models. Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive general capabilities but frequently suffer from ``structural hallucination'' when processing complex documents, limiting their utility in industrial OCR applications. In this paper, we introduce FireRed-OCR, a novel framework designed to transform general-purpose VLMs (based on Qwen3-VL) into pixel-precise structural document parsing experts. To address the scarcity of high-quality structured data, we construct a ``Geometry + Semantics'' Data Factory. Unlike traditional random sampling, our pipeline leverages geometric feature clustering and multi-dimensional tagging to synthesize and curate a highly balanced dataset, effectively handling long-tail layouts and rare document types. Furthermore, we propose a Three-Stage Progressive Training strategy that guides the model from pixel-level perception to logical structure generation. This curriculum includes: (1) Multi-task Pre-alignment to ground the model's understanding of document structure; (2) Specialized SFT for standardizing full-image Markdown output; and (3) Format-Constrained Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which utilizes reinforcement learning to enforce strict syntactic validity and structural integrity (e.g., table closure, formula syntax). Extensive evaluations on OmniDocBench v1.5 demonstrate that FireRed-OCR achieves state-of-the-art performance with an overall score of 92.94\%, significantly outperforming strong baselines such as DeepSeek-OCR 2 and OCRVerse across text, formula, table, and reading order metrics. We open-source our code and model weights to facilitate the ``General VLM to Specialized Structural Expert'' paradigm.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.01840,
  title  = {FireRed-OCR Technical Report},
  author = {Hao Wu and Haoran Lou and Xinyue Li and Zuodong Zhong and Zhaojun Sun and Phellon Chen and Xuanhe Zhou and Kai Zuo and Yibo Chen and Xu Tang and Yao Hu and Boxiang Zhou and Jian Wu and Yongji Wu and Wenxin Yu and Yingmiao Liu and Yuhao Huang and Manjie Xu and Gang Liu and Yidong Ma and Zhichao Sun and Changhao Qiao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.01840},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:59:11.523Z