Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct vs Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct

A small vision-language cousin for reading screenshots, documents, charts and video, in about 6 GB from Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF and every major runtime, under plain Apache 2.0. It has no thinking mode and documents tool calls only in the template. The main risk is no published safety work, so add your own guardrails before it drives a GUI.

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.

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct

1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:8b-instruct
2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:8b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 8b-instruct
3. With the GGUF, load the mmproj vision file too, or images won't be read
4. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags, or use SGLang's --tool-call-parser qwen
5. Use the card's sampling, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.8, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5 for vision and temperature=1.0, top_p=1.0, top_k=40, presence_penalty=2.0 for text
6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later and Transformers 4.57.0 or later

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