OCR-Reasoning
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.
- 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.
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
Nemotron 3.5 Super VL 65.1%
- 2
Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B-A3B 54.1%
- 3
Nemotron Nano 12B v2 VL 36.4%
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | | 65.1% | Oct 2026 | Model card | |
| 2 | | 54.1% | Apr 2026 | Model card | |
| 3 | | 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.
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
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.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Oct 2026 | 65.1 | OCR-Reasoning | |
| 28 Apr 2026 | 54.1 | OCR_Reasoning | |
| 28 Oct 2025 | 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.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Oct 2026 | | 65.1 | OCR-Reasoning (Table 10) | Capabilities |
| 27 Apr 2026 | | 54.1 | OCR-Reasoning, reasoning on, 22.2 reasoning off (Table 7) | Capabilities |
| 6 Nov 2025 | | 33.9 | OCR-Reasoning, reasoning on (Table 3). Reasoning off 21.0 | Capabilities |
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