PaddleOCR-VL 0.9B: The Compact Multimodal AI Revolutionizing Document Understanding

How a simple invoice exposed the real bottleneck in document understanding I stared at the crumpled invoice photo on my screen and sighed. This was the fifth time today I was manually fixing OCR results—jumbled text order, missing table structures, QR codes and stamps mixed with regular text. As a developer dealing with countless documents daily, this routine made me wonder: when will AI truly understand documents? Last week, while browsing GitHub as usual, I came across Baidu’s newly open-sourced PaddleOCR-VL-0.9B. Honestly, when I saw “0.9B parameters,” my first thought was: “Another lightweight model jumping on the bandwagon?” But out …