zai-org/GLM-OCR: GLM-OCR: Accurate × Fast × Comprehensive

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📍 Use GLM-OCR’s API

GLM-OCR is a multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding, built on the GLM-V encoder–decoder architecture. It introduces Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) loss and stable full-task reinforcement learning to improve training efficiency, recognition accuracy, and generalization. The model integrates the CogViT visual encoder pre-trained on large-scale image–text data, a lightweight cross-modal connector with efficient token downsampling, and a GLM-0.5B language decoder. Combined with a two-stage pipeline of layout analysis and parallel recognition based on PP-DocLayout-V3, GLM-OCR delivers robust and high-quality OCR performance across diverse document layouts.

Key Features

• State-of-the-Art Performance: Achieves a score of 94.62 on OmniDocBench V1.5, ranking #1 overall, and delivers state-of-the-art results across major document understanding benchmarks, including formula recognition, table recognition, and information extraction.

• Optimized for Real-World Scenarios: Designed and optimized for practical business use cases, maintaining robust performance on complex tables, code-heavy documents, seals, and other challenging real-world layouts.

• Efficient Inference: With only 0.9B parameters, GLM-OCR supports deployment via vLLM, SGLang, and Ollama, significantly reducing inference latency and compute cost, making it ideal for high-concurrency services and edge deployments.

• Easy to Use: Fully open-sourced and equipped with a comprehensive SDK and inference toolchain, offering simple installation, one-line invocation, and smooth integration into existing production pipelines.

We provide an SDK for using GLM-OCR more efficiently and conveniently.

UV Installation

# Install from source
git clone https://github.com/zai-org/glm-ocr.git
cd glm-ocr
uv venv --python 3.12 --seed && source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -e .

Two ways to use GLM-OCR:

Use the hosted cloud API – no GPU needed. The cloud service runs the complete GLM-OCR pipeline internally, so the SDK simply forwards your request and returns the result.

1. Get an API key from https://open.bigmodel.cn
2. Configure config.yaml:

pipeline:
  maas:
    enabled: true # Enable MaaS mode
    api_key: your-api-key # Required

That’s it! When maas.enabled=true, the SDK acts as a thin wrapper that:

• Forwards your documents to the Zhipu cloud API
• Returns the results directly (Markdown + JSON layout details)
• No local processing, no GPU required

Input note (MaaS): the upstream API accepts file as a URL or a data:;base64,... data URI.
If you have raw base64 without the data: prefix, wrap it as a data URI (recommended). The SDK will
auto-wrap local file paths / bytes / raw base64 into a data URI when calling MaaS.

API documentation: https://docs.bigmodel.cn/cn/guide/models/vlm/glm-ocr

Deploy the GLM-OCR model locally for full control. The SDK provides the complete pipeline: layout detection, parallel region OCR, and result formatting.

Install vLLM:

uv pip install -U vllm --torch-backend=auto --extra-index-url https://wheels.vllm.ai/nightly
# Or use Docker
docker pull vllm/vllm-openai:nightly

Launch the service:

# In docker container, uv may not be need for transformers install
uv pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.git

# Run with MTP for better performance
vllm serve zai-org/GLM-OCR --allowed-local-media-path / --port 8080 --speculative-config '{"method": "mtp", "num_speculative_tokens": 1}' --served-model-name glm-ocr

Install SGLang:

docker pull lmsysorg/sglang:dev
# Or build from source
uv pip install git+https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang.git#subdirectory=python

Launch the service:

# In docker container, uv may not be need for transformers install
uv pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.git

# Run with MTP for better performance
python -m sglang.launch_server --model zai-org/GLM-OCR --port 8080 --speculative-algorithm NEXTN --speculative-num-steps 3 --speculative-eagle-topk 1 --speculative-num-draft-tokens 4 --served-model-name glm-ocr
# Modify the speculative config base on your device

After launching the service, configure config.yaml:

pipeline:
  maas:
    enabled: false # Disable MaaS mode (default)
  ocr_api:
    api_host: localhost # or your vLLM/SGLang server address
    api_port: 8080

See the MLX Detailed Deployment Guide for full setup instructions, including environment isolation and troubleshooting.

# Parse a single image
glmocr parse examples/source/code.png

# Parse a directory
glmocr parse examples/source/

# Set output directory
glmocr parse examples/source/code.png --output ./results/

# Use a custom config
glmocr parse examples/source/code.png --config my_config.yaml

# Enable debug logging with profiling
glmocr parse examples/source/code.png --log-level DEBUG

from glmocr import GlmOcr, parse

# Simple function
result = parse("image.png")
result = parse(["img1.png", "img2.jpg"])
result = parse("https://example.com/image.png")
result.save(output_dir="./results")

# Note: a list is treated as pages of a single document.

# Class-based API
with GlmOcr() as parser:
    result = parser.parse("image.png")
    print(result.json_result)
    result.save()

# Start service
python -m glmocr.server

# With debug logging
python -m glmocr.server --log-level DEBUG

# Call API
curl -X POST http://localhost:5002/glmocr/parse \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"images": ["./example/source/code.png"]}'

Semantics:

• images can be a string or a list.
• A list is treated as pages of a single document.
• For multiple independent documents, call the endpoint multiple times (one document per request).

Full configuration in glmocr/config.yaml:

# Server (for glmocr.server)
server:
  host: "0.0.0.0"
  port: 5002
  debug: false

# Logging
logging:
  level: INFO # DEBUG enables profiling

# Pipeline
pipeline:
  # OCR API connection
  ocr_api:
    api_host: localhost
    api_port: 8080
    api_key: null # or set API_KEY env var
    connect_timeout: 300
    request_timeout: 300

  # Page loader settings
  page_loader:
    max_tokens: 16384
    temperature: 0.01
    image_format: JPEG
    min_pixels: 12544
    max_pixels: 71372800

  # Result formatting
  result_formatter:
    output_format: both # json, markdown, or both

  # Layout detection (optional)
  enable_layout: false

See config.yaml for all options.

Here are two examples of output formats:

[[{ "index": 0, "label": "text", "content": "...", "bbox_2d": null }]]

# Document Title

Body...

| Table | Content |
| ----- | ------- |
| ...   | ...     |

you can run example code like：

python examples/example.py

Output structure (one folder per input):

• result.json – structured OCR result
• result.md – Markdown result
• imgs/ – cropped image regions (when layout mode is enabled)

GLM-OCR uses composable modules for easy customization:

You can extend the behavior by creating custom pipelines:

from glmocr.dataloader import PageLoader
from glmocr.ocr_client import OCRClient
from glmocr.postprocess import ResultFormatter


class MyPipeline:
  def __init__(self, config):
    self.page_loader = PageLoader(config)
    self.ocr_client = OCRClient(config)
    self.formatter = ResultFormatter(config)

  def process(self, request_data):
    # Implement your own processing logic
    pass

This project is inspired by the excellent work of the following projects and communities:

The Code of this repo is under Apache License 2.0.

The GLM-OCR model is released under the MIT License.

The complete OCR pipeline integrates PP-DocLayoutV3 for document layout analysis, which is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Users should comply with both licenses when using this project.