Ai2 releases olmOCR v0.4.0, lifting benchmark score ~4 points with RL
The Allen Institute for AI released olmOCR v0.4.0 on October 21, 2025, a new model trained with synthetic data and reinforcement learning that raises the project's olmOCR-Bench score by roughly 4 points. The toolkit converts PDF, PNG and JPEG documents into clean Markdown, handling equations, tables, handwriting, multi-column layouts and insets while stripping headers and footers and preserving natural reading order. Ai2 says it runs on a 7B vision-language model requiring a GPU, at under $200 per million pages, and reports an olmOCR-Bench score of 82.4±1.1 for v0.4.0 — just below Chandra OCR 0.1.0 (83.1) on its own leaderboard.
Reliable, low-cost document linearization underpins the text corpora used for LLM training and retrieval, so accuracy and price improvements affect how much data teams can process.