How to Use Frontier Vision LLMs: Qwen3-VL

Qwen 3 VL, a newly released Vision Language Model, processes both images and text to extract visual information from documents more effectively than traditional OCR methods. Unlike OCR which loses visual positioning data and produces imperfect text extraction, VLMs understand spatial relationships between visual elements like checkboxes and corresponding text. Testing showed Qwen 3 VL successfully performed OCR and extracted specific metadata into JSON format, though it faces challenges with occasionally missing text and requiring significant processing power for larger documents.