Baseer: A Vision-Language Model for Arabic Document-to-Markdown OCR

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18174v1
• Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2025 15:07:29 GMT
• Title: Baseer: A Vision-Language Model for Arabic Document-to-Markdown OCR
• Authors: Khalil Hennara, Muhammad Hreden, Mohamed Motasim Hamed, Ahmad Bastati, Zeina Aldallal, Sara Chrouf, Safwan AlModhayan,
• Abstract summary: We introduce Baseer, a vision-language model fine- tuned specifically for Arabic document OCR.<n>Leveraging a large-scale dataset combining synthetic and real-world documents, Baseer is trained using a decoder-only fine-tuning strategy.<n>Our experiments show that Baseer significantly outperforms existing open-source and commercial solutions, achieving a WER of 0.25.
• Score: 1.7590081165362783
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Arabic document OCR remains a challenging task due to the language's cursive script, diverse fonts, diacritics, and right-to-left orientation. While modern Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced document understanding for high-resource languages, their performance on Arabic remains limited. In this work, we introduce Baseer, a vision-language model fine- tuned specifically for Arabic document OCR. Leveraging a large-scale dataset combining synthetic and real-world documents, Baseer is trained using a decoder-only fine-tuning strategy to adapt a pre-trained MLLM while preserving general visual features. We also present Misraj-DocOCR, a high-quality, expert-verified benchmark designed for rigorous evaluation of Arabic OCR systems. Our experiments show that Baseer significantly outperforms existing open-source and commercial solutions, achieving a WER of 0.25 and establishing a new state-of-the-art in the domain of Arabic document OCR. Our results highlight the benefits of domain-specific adaptation of general-purpose MLLMs and establish a strong baseline for high-accuracy OCR on morphologically rich languages like Arabic.

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