PaddleOCR 3.5: Running OCR and Document Parsing Tasks with a Transformers Backend

PaddleOCR 3.5 brings OCR and document parsing tasks closer to the Hugging Face ecosystem. With this release, supported PaddleOCR models can run with Hugging Face Transformers as an inference backend by setting:

engine="transformers"

PaddleOCR continues to provide OCR model series such as PP-OCRv5 and document parsing model series such as PaddleOCR-VL 1.5, while Transformers becomes one of the supported backends for running them.

Try the live demo on Hugging Face Spaces: https://huggingface.co/spaces/PaddlePaddle/paddleocr-3.5-transformers-demo

What changed?

PaddleOCR 3.5 introduces a more flexible inference-engine interface. Developers can select the backend through the engine parameter and pass backend-specific options through engine_config.

In practice, this means:

• The pipelines behind these tasks are managed by PaddleOCR, so developers do not need to manually call each internal component.
• Transformers becomes one of the supported inference backends for running supported PaddleOCR models.
• Developers can configure backend-related options such as dtype, device placement, and attention implementation through engine_config.

A simple way to understand the stack:

Layer	What it means	Examples
Application layer	Applications that use OCR and document parsing outputs	RAG, agents, Document AI...
Model layer	OCR and document parsing capabilities	PP-OCRv5, PaddleOCR-VL 1.5...
Inference backend layer	Runtime used to run supported models	Paddle static graph, Paddle dynamic graph, Transformers

This release is mainly about the inference backend layer: PaddleOCR continues to provide OCR and document parsing capabilities, while Transformers gives supported PaddleOCR models another backend option that fits naturally into Hugging Face-centered environments. The larger Document AI workflow remains in the hands of developers and application builders.

Why this matters

For RAG, Document AI, and document agent applications, the hard part often starts before the LLM.