Introduction to SmolDocling
Enhance Your RAG Pipeline by Using SmolDocling to Parse Complex Documents (Tables, Equations, Charts & Code) into Your Vector DB
Vision + Structure: SmolDocling is a new 256M-parameter model that reads entire document pages and converts them into a rich DocTags markup format capturing content and layout.
Compact & Fast: Despite its small size, it matches the accuracy of models 10–27× larger. It runs quickly (≈0.35s/page on an A100 GPU).
Key Features: Built-in OCR with bounding boxes, formula/code recognition, table/chart parsing, list grouping, caption linking, etc., all in one end-to-end package.
The Problem with Traditional Document AI
Have you ever tried to copy-paste text from a PDF research paper and ended up with gibberish, missing figures, or malformed equations? Complex documents are often packed with non-text elements like images, graphs, tables and math , that simple text-based AI can’t handle.
What is SmolDocling?
SmolDocling aims to change that, it’s a multimodal AI model designed to process a whole page image and output a single, structured representation of everything on it.
How SmolDocling Works
In this post, we’ll see why combining vision and language is essential for modern document AI, and how SmolDocling’s features set let it convert complex docs end-to-end.
Traditional document AI often treated pages as “just text”. One common pattern was: run an OCR engine to get all the words (and their positions), then feed that into a text model.
Conclusion
SmolDocling is a game-changer for document AI, offering a compact, fast, and accurate solution for parsing complex documents. Its ability to capture content and layout makes it an essential tool for anyone working with documents.
FAQs
- What is SmolDocling?
SmolDocling is a multimodal AI model designed to process a whole page image and output a single, structured representation of everything on it. - What are the key features of SmolDocling?
SmolDocling has built-in OCR with bounding boxes, formula/code recognition, table/chart parsing, list grouping, caption linking, etc., all in one end-to-end package. - How fast is SmolDocling?
SmolDocling runs quickly (≈0.35s/page on an A100 GPU). - What is the advantage of SmolDocling over traditional document AI?
SmolDocling combines vision and language to capture content and layout, making it more accurate and effective than traditional document AI.
