With the rise of vision-language models (VLMs) (such as Qwen-VL and GPT-4.1), new end-to-end OCR models like DeepSeek-OCR have emerged. These models jointly understand visual and textual information, enabling direct interpretation of PDFs without an explicit layout detection step.
However, this paradigm shift raises an important question:
If a VLM can already process both the document images and the query to produce an answer directly, do we still need the intermediate OCR step?
Do we still need OCR when we can build a pure vision-based AI agent · HackerTrans
However, this paradigm shift raises an important question:
If a VLM can already process both the document images and the query to produce an answer directly, do we still need the intermediate OCR step?