Definition
Mistral OCR is a multi-modal document understanding model optimized for extracting structured text, tables, and formatting from unstructured images and PDFs into LLM-ready formats like Markdown. In RAG pipelines, it serves as the critical ingestion layer that preserves document hierarchy and semantic layout to improve retrieval accuracy.
Distinct from traditional character recognition (OCR) which only extracts raw strings; this is a vision-language model that understands context and structural relationships.
"A digital archeologist who doesn't just find the letters on a tablet, but recreates the entire blueprint of the temple where they were found."
- Multi-modal LLM(Underlying Architecture)
- Document Parsing(Prerequisite)
- Markdown Extraction(Component)
- Semantic Chunking(Downstream Dependency)
Conceptual Overview
Mistral OCR is a multi-modal document understanding model optimized for extracting structured text, tables, and formatting from unstructured images and PDFs into LLM-ready formats like Markdown. In RAG pipelines, it serves as the critical ingestion layer that preserves document hierarchy and semantic layout to improve retrieval accuracy.
Disambiguation
Distinct from traditional character recognition (OCR) which only extracts raw strings; this is a vision-language model that understands context and structural relationships.
Visual Analog
A digital archeologist who doesn't just find the letters on a tablet, but recreates the entire blueprint of the temple where they were found.