DeepSeek-VL

DeepSeek-VL is DeepSeek’s open vision-language model series, built for real-world seeing-and-reading tasks: document understanding, chart and OCR reading, visual grounding and general multimodal chat. Released in 1.3B and 7B sizes, the models punched well above their weight on vision-language benchmarks when they appeared. The project has about 4,200 stars on GitHub.

Overview

The architecture uses a hybrid vision encoder that processes high-resolution images (up to 1024×1024) efficiently by combining a SigLIP encoder for global semantics with a SAM-B encoder that preserves fine detail — crucial for reading small text in documents and screenshots. A modality-adapted pretraining strategy and a training mix drawn from real applications (web screenshots, PDFs, charts, tables, manuals) make the models practical for the messy inputs products actually receive, not just curated photos. DeepSeek-VL handles referring-expression grounding, OCR-heavy question answering and multi-image reasoning, and ships with inference code, a Gradio demo and Hugging Face checkpoints. It is the direct predecessor of DeepSeek-VL2 and a clean, well-documented reference for building efficient vision-language models.

On benchmarks, the 7B model outperformed several larger contemporaries on document and chart understanding suites while using far less compute, which made it popular for on-premise deployments in finance and enterprise search. The training curriculum is documented in the accompanying paper — vision-language alignment first, then instruction tuning with a deliberate share of pure-text data so language ability does not regress. DeepSeek later superseded it with DeepSeek-VL2’s mixture-of-experts design, but the original remains the lighter, simpler option.

Key Features

• Vision-language models in efficient 1.3B and 7B sizes
• Hybrid vision encoder preserves fine detail for OCR and documents
• Strong on charts, tables, screenshots and visual grounding
• High-resolution input support up to 1024×1024
• Open weights on Hugging Face with inference code and demo
• Trained on real-world application data, not only curated images

💳 Pricing

DeepSeek-VL is free and open source under the MIT license; model use follows DeepSeek’s model license, which permits research and commercial use.

Who Is It For

DeepSeek-VL is for developers and researchers who need a compact, capable vision-language model for document understanding, OCR-centric apps or multimodal assistants.