Darwin-36B-Opus vs Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

Darwin-36B-Opus

A text-only reasoning cousin merged from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and a reasoning-distilled fine-tune of it, with about 3B active parameters. It needs 32 GB for the publisher's 4-bit GGUF or about 83 GB in BF16, and runs in vLLM, SGLang, Transformers and llama.cpp. The main risks are an undisclosed merge method, a card that disagrees with its files, and no safety results.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

A small MIT document-parsing cousin that reads up to hundreds of pages in one request and returns ordered layout blocks with boxes and HTML tables. It needs an NVIDIA GPU with about 12 GB, through Baidu's remote code or its own SGLang build. The risks are running the publisher's code and accuracy figures that are Baidu's own.

Darwin-36B-Opus

1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf FINAL-Bench/POCKET-35B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 21 GB of files
2. On the reference machine BF16 fits, vllm serve FINAL-Bench/Darwin-36B-Opus --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, the parsers for Qwen3.6's format
3. Thinking is on by default, send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
4. The card suggests temperature 0.6 to 0.7 and at least 5,120 new tokens for its think traces
5. generation_config.json stops only on the end-of-text token, so add <|im_end|> as a stop token if a runtime keeps generating after the turn ends
6. Text only, the vision encoder of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B isn't in these files
7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

1. Quickest local run, pip install torch==2.13.0 torchvision pillow transformers==4.52.1 huggingface-hub==0.36.0 tokenizers==0.21.4 addict==2.4.0 einops==0.8.2 easydict==1.13, then AutoModel.from_pretrained("baidu/Unlimited-OCR-2", trust_remote_code=True, use_safetensors=True, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16).eval().cuda() and model.infer_multi(tokenizer, image_files=pages, output_path="out")
2. To serve it, download the repository, install wheel/sglang-0.5.20.dev10+g8d62f5fb9c-py3-none-any.whl with pymupdf and fastokens in a Python 3.10 venv, and start python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path baidu/Unlimited-OCR-2 --chat-template unlimited-ocr --enable-custom-logit-processor --enable-streaming-session --disable-radix-cache --mem-fraction-static 0.7 --max-prefill-tokens 2048 with the SGLANG_UOCR_ variables from the card
3. Send all pages of a document in one request, images first, then the text <PAGE><image> repeated per page and Multi page parsing., with temperature 0, skip_special_tokens false, max_tokens of about 8,000 per page and the DeepseekOCRNoRepeatNGramLogitProcessor (ngram_size 35, window_size 1024 for several pages)
4. The output is layout blocks, not Markdown; run utils/process_unlimitedOCR2.py from github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR, or convert(raw_output) in Python, to get Markdown with HTML tables
5. Render PDFs to images first (the card uses PyMuPDF at 300 DPI), keep save_results off for untrusted documents, and treat extracted text as untrusted before passing it to another model