Baseer: A Vision-Language Model for Arabic Document-to-Markdown OCR

Khalil Hennara, Muhammad Hreden, Mohamed Motasim Hamed, Ahmad Bastati, Zeina Aldallal, Sara Chrouf, Safwan AlModhayan

Baseer: A Vision-Language Model for Arabic Document-to-Markdown OCR: 135 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #1 of 24 papers on 2025-09-24. Day-by-day upvote history.

Arabic document OCR remains a challenging task due to the language's cursive script, diverse fonts, diacritics, and right-to-left orientation. While modern Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced document understanding for high-resource languages, their performance on Arabic remains limited. In this work, we introduce Baseer, a vision-language model fine- tuned specifically for Arabic document OCR. Leveraging a large-scale dataset combining synthetic and real-world documents, Baseer is trained using a decoder-only fine-tuning strategy to adapt a pre-trained MLLM while preserving general visual features. We also present Misraj-DocOCR, a high-quality, expert-verified benchmark designed for rigorous evaluation of Arabic OCR systems. Our experiments show that Baseer significantly outperforms existing open-source and commercial solutions, achieving a WER of 0.25 and establishing a new state-of-the-art in the domain of Arabic document OCR. Our results highlight the benefits of domain-specific adaptation of general-purpose MLLMs and establish a strong baseline for high-accuracy OCR on morphologically rich languages like Arabic.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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