Cheng Cui

Cheng Cui, Ting Sun, Suyin Liang et al.

We introduce PaddleOCR-VL-1.5, an upgraded model achieving a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy of 94.5% on OmniDocBench v1.5. To rigorously evaluate robustness against real-world physical distortions, including scanning, skew, warping, screen-photography, and illumination, we propose the Real5-OmniDocBench benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that this enhanced model attains SOTA performance on the newly curated benchmark. Furthermore, we extend the model's capabilities by incorporating seal recognition and text spotting tasks, while remaining a 0.9B ultra-compact VLM with high efficiency. Code: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

Haifeng Wang, Hua Wu, Tian Wu et al.

In this report, we introduce ERNIE 5.0, a natively autoregressive foundation model desinged for unified multimodal understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. All modalities are trained from scratch under a unified next-group-of-tokens prediction objective, based on an ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with modality-agnostic expert routing. To address practical challenges in large-scale deployment under diverse resource constraints, ERNIE 5.0 adopts a novel elastic training paradigm. Within a single pre-training run, the model learns a family of sub-models with varying depths, expert capacities, and routing sparsity, enabling flexible trade-offs among performance, model size, and inference latency in memory- or time-constrained scenarios. Moreover, we systematically address the challenges of scaling reinforcement learning to unified foundation models, thereby guaranteeing efficient and stable post-training under ultra-sparse MoE architectures and diverse multimodal settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ERNIE 5.0 achieves strong and balanced performance across multiple modalities. To the best of our knowledge, among publicly disclosed models, ERNIE 5.0 represents the first production-scale realization of a trillion-parameter unified autoregressive model that supports both multimodal understanding and generation. To facilitate further research, we present detailed visualizations of modality-agnostic expert routing in the unified model, alongside comprehensive empirical analysis of elastic training, aiming to offer profound insights to the community.

Cheng Cui, Ting Sun, Manhui Lin et al.

This technical report introduces PaddleOCR 3.0, an Apache-licensed open-source toolkit for OCR and document parsing. To address the growing demand for document understanding in the era of large language models, PaddleOCR 3.0 presents three major solutions: (1) PP-OCRv5 for multilingual text recognition, (2) PP-StructureV3 for hierarchical document parsing, and (3) PP-ChatOCRv4 for key information extraction. Compared to mainstream vision-language models (VLMs), these models with fewer than 100 million parameters achieve competitive accuracy and efficiency, rivaling billion-parameter VLMs. In addition to offering a high-quality OCR model library, PaddleOCR 3.0 provides efficient tools for training, inference, and deployment, supports heterogeneous hardware acceleration, and enables developers to easily build intelligent document applications.

Guanghua Yu, Qinyao Chang, Wenyu Lv et al.

The better accuracy and efficiency trade-off has been a challenging problem in object detection. In this work, we are dedicated to studying key optimizations and neural network architecture choices for object detection to improve accuracy and efficiency. We investigate the applicability of the anchor-free strategy on lightweight object detection models. We enhance the backbone structure and design the lightweight structure of the neck, which improves the feature extraction ability of the network. We improve label assignment strategy and loss function to make training more stable and efficient. Through these optimizations, we create a new family of real-time object detectors, named PP-PicoDet, which achieves superior performance on object detection for mobile devices. Our models achieve better trade-offs between accuracy and latency compared to other popular models. PicoDet-S with only 0.99M parameters achieves 30.6% mAP, which is an absolute 4.8% improvement in mAP while reducing mobile CPU inference latency by 55% compared to YOLOX-Nano, and is an absolute 7.1% improvement in mAP compared to NanoDet. It reaches 123 FPS (150 FPS using Paddle Lite) on mobile ARM CPU when the input size is 320. PicoDet-L with only 3.3M parameters achieves 40.9% mAP, which is an absolute 3.7% improvement in mAP and 44% faster than YOLOv5s. As shown in Figure 1, our models far outperform the state-of-the-art results for lightweight object detection. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.

Shengyu Wei, Ruoyu Guo, Cheng Cui et al.

In recent years, image recognition applications have developed rapidly. A large number of studies and techniques have emerged in different fields, such as face recognition, pedestrian and vehicle re-identification, landmark retrieval, and product recognition. In this paper, we propose a practical lightweight image recognition system, named PP-ShiTu, consisting of the following 3 modules, mainbody detection, feature extraction and vector search. We introduce popular strategies including metric learning, deep hash, knowledge distillation and model quantization to improve accuracy and inference speed. With strategies above, PP-ShiTu works well in different scenarios with a set of models trained on a mixed dataset. Experiments on different datasets and benchmarks show that the system is widely effective in different domains of image recognition. All the above mentioned models are open-sourced and the code is available in the GitHub repository PaddleClas on PaddlePaddle.

Yuning Du, Chenxia Li, Ruoyu Guo et al.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been widely used in various of application scenarios. Designing an OCR system is still a challenging task. In previous work, we proposed a practical ultra lightweight OCR system (PP-OCR) to balance the accuracy against the efficiency. In order to improve the accuracy of PP-OCR and keep high efficiency, in this paper, we propose a more robust OCR system, i.e. PP-OCRv2. We introduce bag of tricks to train a better text detector and a better text recognizer, which include Collaborative Mutual Learning (CML), CopyPaste, Lightweight CPUNetwork (LCNet), Unified-Deep Mutual Learning (U-DML) and Enhanced CTCLoss. Experiments on real data show that the precision of PP-OCRv2 is 7% higher than PP-OCR under the same inference cost. It is also comparable to the server models of the PP-OCR which uses ResNet series as backbones. All of the above mentioned models are open-sourced and the code is available in the GitHub repository PaddleOCR which is powered by PaddlePaddle.

Pengcheng Yuan, Shufei Lin, Cheng Cui et al.

This paper addresses representational block named Hierarchical-Split Block, which can be taken as a plug-and-play block to upgrade existing convolutional neural networks, improves model performance significantly in a network. Hierarchical-Split Block contains many hierarchical split and concatenate connections within one single residual block. We find multi-scale features is of great importance for numerous vision tasks. Moreover, Hierarchical-Split block is very flexible and efficient, which provides a large space of potential network architectures for different applications. In this work, we present a common backbone based on Hierarchical-Split block for tasks: image classification, object detection, instance segmentation and semantic image segmentation/parsing. Our approach shows significant improvements over all these core tasks in comparison with the baseline. As shown in Figure1, for image classification, our 50-layers network(HS-ResNet50) achieves 81.28% top-1 accuracy with competitive latency on ImageNet-1k dataset. It also outperforms most state-of-the-art models. The source code and models will be available on: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleClas

Kaibing Chen, Cheng Cui, Yuning Du et al.

We present a retrieval based system for landmark retrieval and recognition challenge.There are five parts in retrieval competition system, including feature extraction and matching to get candidates queue; database augmentation and query extension searching; reranking from recognition results and local feature matching. In recognition challenge including: landmark and non-landmark recognition, multiple recognition results voting and reranking using combination of recognition and retrieval results. All of models trained and predicted by PaddlePaddle framework. Using our method, we achieved 2nd place in the Google Landmark Recognition 2019 and 2nd place in the Google Landmark Retrieval 2019 on kaggle. The source code is available at here.

Cheng Cui, Tingquan Gao, Shengyu Wei et al.

We propose a lightweight CPU network based on the MKLDNN acceleration strategy, named PP-LCNet, which improves the performance of lightweight models on multiple tasks. This paper lists technologies which can improve network accuracy while the latency is almost constant. With these improvements, the accuracy of PP-LCNet can greatly surpass the previous network structure with the same inference time for classification. As shown in Figure 1, it outperforms the most state-of-the-art models. And for downstream tasks of computer vision, it also performs very well, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, etc. All our experiments are implemented based on PaddlePaddle. Code and pretrained models are available at PaddleClas.

Cheng Cui, Ruoyu Guo, Yuning Du et al.

Recently, research efforts have been concentrated on revealing how pre-trained model makes a difference in neural network performance. Self-supervision and semi-supervised learning technologies have been extensively explored by the community and are proven to be of great potential in obtaining a powerful pre-trained model. However, these models require huge training costs (i.e., hundreds of millions of images or training iterations). In this paper, we propose to improve existing baseline networks via knowledge distillation from off-the-shelf pre-trained big powerful models. Different from existing knowledge distillation frameworks which require student model to be consistent with both soft-label generated by teacher model and hard-label annotated by humans, our solution performs distillation by only driving prediction of the student model consistent with that of the teacher model. Therefore, our distillation setting can get rid of manually labeled data and can be trained with extra unlabeled data to fully exploit capability of teacher model for better learning. We empirically find that such simple distillation settings perform extremely effective, for example, the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k validation set of MobileNetV3-large and ResNet50-D can be significantly improved from 75.2% to 79% and 79.1% to 83%, respectively. We have also thoroughly analyzed what are dominant factors that affect the distillation performance and how they make a difference. Extensive downstream computer vision tasks, including transfer learning, object detection and semantic segmentation, can significantly benefit from the distilled pretrained models. All our experiments are implemented based on PaddlePaddle, codes and a series of improved pretrained models with ssld suffix are available in PaddleClas.

Cheng Cui, Zhi Ye, Yangxi Li et al.

Simi-Supervised Recognition Challenge-FGVC7 is a challenging fine-grained recognition competition. One of the difficulties of this competition is how to use unlabeled data. We adopted pseudo-tag data mining to increase the amount of training data. The other one is how to identify similar birds with a very small difference, especially those have a relatively tiny main-body in examples. We combined generic image recognition and fine-grained image recognition method to solve the problem. All generic image recognition models were training using PaddleClas . Using the combination of two different ways of deep recognition models, we finally won the third place in the competition.

Ruoyu Guo, Cheng Cui, Yuning Du et al.

We present an object detection framework based on PaddlePaddle. We put all the strategies together (multi-scale training, FPN, Cascade, Dcnv2, Non-local, libra loss) based on ResNet200-vd backbone. Our model score on public leaderboard comes to 0.6269 with single scale test. We proposed a new voting method called top-k voting-nms, based on the SoftNMS detection results. The voting method helps us merge all the models' results more easily and achieve 2nd place in the Google AI Open Images Object Detection Track 2019.