Jina AI, part of Elastic, has released jina-ocr-v1, an end-to-end visual document parser. It takes PDFs, scans, tables, charts or invoices and returns clean Markdown in 1 pass. The model has 3.4B total parameters, with about 570M decoder parameters active per token. A speculative decoding head ships inside the checkpoint. Jina AI built it to serve on low-budget GPUs such as the NVIDIA L4. The technical report lists 91.14 on OmniDocBench v1.6 and 83.4 on olmOCR-Bench.
Is it deployable? Yes, for research and non-commercial use. The open weights are about 6.8 GB in BF16 and run on Transformers or vLLM. The CC BY-NC 4.0 license means commercial use requires contacting Jina AI.
What is jina-ocr-v1?
The model post-trains DeepSeek-OCR and keeps its 2 efficiency components. DeepEncoder has about 380M parameters and chains SAM, a 16x convolutional compressor and CLIP-L. It turns a 1024×1024 page view from 4,096 patches into 256 visual tokens. A dynamic-resolution mode adds up to 9 local tiles at 100 tokens each. That caps a page at 1,156 visual tokens.
The decoder is DeepSeek-3B-MoE with 12 layers, 64 routed experts and 2 shared experts. Top-6 routing activates about 570M parameters per token. The position limit is 32,768. Output is Markdown, with tables in HTML and formulas in LaTeX.
How FastMTP Speculative Decoding Works
OCR output is near-deterministic and locally structured. That makes it a good fit for speculative decoding. Jina AI adds a FastMTP head: 1 dense draft block applied recursively for K=3 steps. Draft parameters stay constant as depth grows.
The decoder then verifies the drafts greedily. It accepts the longest prefix that matches its own choices and commits 1 more token itself. If all 3 drafts match, that extra token is a bonus. The committed text always equals plain greedy decoding, so the speedup is lossless. At K=3 the model commits 2.73 tokens per step on average.