LensVLM-9B by Apple

Apple introduced LensVLM, an inference framework and post-training recipe, on May 7. This framework allows Vision Language Models (VLMs) to process text as rendered images, addressing the challenge of accuracy deterioration with increased compression. LensVLM, built on Qwen3.5-9B-Base, maintains accuracy comparable to full-text upper bounds at 4.3x effective compression and outperforms baselines up to 10.1x effective compression across seven text QA benchmarks. It also generalizes to multimodal document and code understanding tasks, with accuracy gains increasing with compression.