DharmaOCR: Open-Source Specialized SLM (3B) + Cost–Performance Benchmark against LLMs and other open-sourced models [R]

Reddit r/MachineLearning / 4/25/2026

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Key Points

  • DharmaOCR has been open-sourced on Hugging Face, with models and datasets made publicly available for free experimentation.
  • The project fine-tuned open-source SLMs (3B and 7B) using SFT plus DPO, then benchmarked them against GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 4.6, Google Document AI, and several OCR open-source alternatives.
  • The specialized 7B and 3B models achieved top benchmark scores of 0.925 and 0.911 respectively, outperforming the tested baselines.
  • Using DPO where rejected examples come from the model’s own degenerate outputs reduced the failure rate by 87.6%.
  • AWQ quantization reduced per-page inference cost by about 22% while having an insignificant impact on performance.

Hey everyone, we just open-sourced DharmaOCR on Hugging Face. Models and datasets are all public, free to use and experiment with.

We also published the paper documenting all the experimentation behind it, for those who want to dig into the methodology.

We fine-tuned open-source SLMs (3B and 7B parameters) using SFT + DPO and ran them against GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 4.6, Google Document AI, and open-source alternatives like OlmOCR, Deepseek-OCR, GLMOCR, and Qwen3.

- The specialized models came out on top: 0.925 (7B) and 0.911 (3B).

- DPO using the model's own degenerate outputs as rejected examples cut the failure rate by 87.6%.

- AWQ quantization drops per-page inference cost ~22%, with insignificant effect on performance.

Models & datasets: https://huggingface.co/Dharma-AI

Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14314

Paper summary: https://gist.science/paper/2604.14314

submitted by /u/augusto_camargo3
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