NuMarkdown-8B-Thinking

NuMarkdown-8B-Thinking is the first reasoning OCR vision-language model (VLM) designed to convert documents into clean Markdown optimized for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Built on Qwen 2.5-VL-7B and fine-tuned with synthetic Doc → Reasoning → Markdown examples, it generates thinking tokens before producing the final Markdown to better handle complex layouts and tables. It uses a two-phase training process: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (GRPO) with a layout-centric reward for accuracy on challenging documents. The model excels at non-standard layouts and complex table structures, outperforming non-reasoning OCR systems like GPT-4o and OCRFlux, and competing with large closed-source reasoning models like Gemini 2.5. Thinking token usage can range from 20% to 500% of the final answer, depending on task difficulty. NuMarkdown-8B-Thinking is released under the MIT license and supports vLLM and Transformers for deployment.