Train a Small Document Understanding Model, Then Run It in Rust

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0300

The OCR engine reads text. The understanding model turns that text into a document record.

For Kenyan ID extraction, I wanted a small local model that does one thing: receive noisy OCR lines and return this JSON shape:

{
 "serial_number": "...",
 "id_number": "...",
 "full_names": "...",
 "date_of_birth": "...",
 "sex": "...",
 "district_of_birth": "...",
 "place_of_issue": "...",
 "date_of_issue": "..."
}

I published the code as drmhse/paddle-paddle-v6-ocr-rust . The important directory is training/.

Mlx on DRM HSE

Train a Small Document Understanding Model, Then Run It in Rust