Benchmark Almanac

OCR-Reasoning

Nemotron 3.5 Super VL 65.1% leads since Oct 2026 Fading

Models answer 1,069 human-annotated questions that need reasoning over text-rich images. The questions cover 6 reasoning abilities and 18 practical tasks.

Accepted at ICLR 2026. The data also holds step-by-step reasoning annotations. NVIDIA grades answers with a GPT-4o-mini judge.

In the authors’ words

Recent advancements in multimodal slow-thinking systems have demonstrated remarkable performance across various visual reasoning tasks. However, their capabilities in text-rich image reasoning tasks remain understudied due to the absence of a dedicated and systematic benchmark. To address this gap, we propose OCR-Reasoning, a novel benchmark designed to systematically assess Multimodal Large Language Models on text-rich image reasoning tasks. Specifically, OCR-Reasoning comprises 1,069 human-annotated examples spanning 6 core reasoning abilities and 18 practical reasoning tasks in text-rich visual scenarios. Unlike existing text-rich image understanding benchmarks that only provide a final answer, this benchmark additionally provides a detailed step-by-step reasoning process. This dual annotation enables the evaluation of both the models' final answers and their reasoning processes, thereby offering a holistic assessment of text-rich reasoning capabilities. By leveraging this benchmark, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the latest MLLMs. Our results demonstrate that even the most advanced MLLMs exhibit substantial difficulties in text-rich image reasoning tasks, with none achieving an accuracy above 50% on our benchmark, indicating that the challenges of text-rich image reasoning are an urgent issue to be addressed. The benchmark and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/SCUT-DLVCLab/OCR-Reasoning.

Abstract of OCR-Reasoning Benchmark: Unveiling the True Capabilities of MLLMs in Complex Text-Rich Image Reasoning (arXiv:2505.17163, CC0)
Made by SCUT-DLVCLab (Huang et al.) Released May 2025 Documents, charts and text in images All tasks public Last in a launch post Oct 2026 , dropped before it saturated Last model added Oct 2026
Level
Everyday Most adults, without training
Scored
Graded by a model A language model scores each response, usually against a rubric.
Answers
Short answer A number, word or short string matched to a key.
3
Models scored in lab cards
3
Launch posts list it, from 1 lab
3
System cards report it, from 1 lab

Nemotron 3.5 Super VL leads with 65.1%

Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.

  1. 1 Nemotron 3.5 Super VL 65.1%
  2. 2 Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B-A3B 54.1%
  3. 3 Nemotron Nano 12B v2 VL 36.4%
#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 Nemotron 3.5 Super VL 65.1% Oct 2026 Model card
2 Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B-A3B 54.1% Apr 2026 Model card
3 Nemotron Nano 12B v2 VL 36.4% Oct 2025 Model card

3 models have held number one since its release in May 2025

Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.

NVIDIA
Lab claims 3 leaders

Scores over time

All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.

Reported by the lab in its model card Best so far
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2026 Near the ceiling (85%) Nemotron 3.5 Super VL Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B-A3B Nemotron Nano 12B v2 VL 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2026 Near the ceiling (85%) Nemotron 3.5 Super VL Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B-A3B

Labs headline it less often now, last in Oct 2026

Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.

NVIDIA
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
15 Oct 2026 Nemotron 3.5 Super VL 65.1 OCR-Reasoning
28 Apr 2026 Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B-A3B 54.1 OCR_Reasoning
28 Oct 2025 Nemotron Nano 12B v2 VL 36.4 OCR-Reasoning

3 system cards report it, from 1 lab

Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.

DateDocumentScoreAs the document writes itSection
15 Oct 2026 Nemotron 3.5 Super VL technical report 65.1 OCR-Reasoning (Table 10) Capabilities
27 Apr 2026 Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B-A3B technical report 54.1 OCR-Reasoning, reasoning on, 22.2 reasoning off (Table 7) Capabilities
6 Nov 2025 Nemotron Nano 12B v2 VL technical report 33.9 OCR-Reasoning, reasoning on (Table 3). Reasoning off 21.0 Capabilities

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