SmolDocling: An ultra-compact vision-language model for end-to-end
  multi-modal document conversion
Authors: name: Ahmed Nassar; name: Andres Marafioti; name: Matteo Omenetti; name: Maksym Lysak; name: Nikolaos Livathinos; name: Christoph Auer; name: Lucas Morin; name: Rafael Teixeira de Lima; name: Yusik Kim; name: A. Said Gurbuz; name: Michele Dolfi; name: Miquel Farré; name: Peter W. J. Staar
Published: 2025-03-14 16:44:14

Abstract: We introduce SmolDocling, an ultra-compact vision-language model targeting
end-to-end document conversion. Our model comprehensively processes entire
pages by generating DocTags, a new universal markup format that captures all
page elements in their full context with location. Unlike existing approaches
that rely on large foundational models, or ensemble solutions that rely on
handcrafted pipelines of multiple specialized models, SmolDocling offers an
end-to-end conversion for accurately capturing content, structure and spatial
location of document elements in a 256M parameters vision-language model.
SmolDocling exhibits robust performance in correctly reproducing document
features such as code listings, tables, equations, charts, lists, and more
across a diverse range of document types including business documents, academic
papers, technical reports, patents, and forms -- significantly extending beyond
the commonly observed focus on scientific papers. Additionally, we contribute
novel publicly sourced datasets for charts, tables, equations, and code
recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that SmolDocling competes with
other Vision Language Models that are up to 27 times larger in size, while
reducing computational requirements substantially. The model is currently
available, datasets will be publicly available soon.