Nougat Small converts scientific PDFs to markdown — Meta's specialized model that understands LaTeX math equations, tables, and scientific notation to extract accurate machine-readable content from academic papers.
Nougat Small is an AI model released August 2023 by facebook, a leading organization in large language model research. Meta's Nougat — converts academic PDFs into clean Markdown, preserving math equations, tables, and inline code blocks. With 250M and a a large context window context window, Nougat Small is designed to excel across a range of demanding tasks — from software engineering and mathematical problem-solving to multilingual content generation and long-document analysis.
Nougat Small uses a dense transformer architecture with 250M of parameters, all of which are active for every input token. Dense architectures provide predictable, consistent behavior across diverse task types — there are no "cold" experts to warm up, and quality is uniform across prompts. facebook's training pipeline combined large-scale pretraining on arXiv papers in PDF format with supervised fine-tuning and alignment techniques (RLHF or DPO), producing Nougat Small's characteristic balance of capability, helpfulness, and safety.
As of 2026-10-16, Nougat Small by facebook demonstrates measurable performance on standard AI evaluation benchmarks. On BLEU (arXiv) — which measures machine translation quality against human references — it achieves 21.0. These scores place Nougat Small — at 250M of parameters — in a competitive position within its model class. Note that benchmark scores reflect controlled evaluation conditions; real-world performance varies by task, prompt design, and domain specificity.
The primary strengths of Nougat Small are: Converts academic PDFs to LaTeX/Markdown — handles math equations; MIT license; Critical for scientific document digitization. These make it particularly well-suited for Academic paper digitization for search, Mathematical equation extraction, Scientific knowledge base construction. Users working on complex, multi-step problems benefit most from Nougat Small's ability to maintain coherence across long inputs and produce structured, verifiable outputs.
Like all current AI systems, Nougat Small has limitations: Slow — 20-30s per page; Specialized for academic papers only. For production deployments, validating outputs against authoritative sources — especially for domain-specific or time-sensitive information — remains best practice. facebook continues to improve Nougat Small through ongoing research.
Nougat Small is available on LITHOVEX AI with a free account. Unlike direct API access — which requires billing setup, API key management, and per-token charges — LITHOVEX AI provides a seamless browser interface with no setup required, making Nougat Small accessible to students, researchers, developers, and early-stage teams globally.
As of 2026-10-16, Nougat Small by facebook demonstrates measurable performance on standard AI evaluation benchmarks. On BLEU (arXiv) — which measures machine translation quality against human references — it achieves 21.0. These scores place Nougat Small — at 250M of parameters — in a competitive position within its model class. Note that benchmark scores reflect controlled evaluation conditions; real-world performance varies by task, prompt design, and domain specificity.
Encoder-decoder vision transformer, 250M parameters for academic PDF OCR
The training pipeline for Nougat Small involves multiple stages: large-scale pretraining on arXiv papers in PDF format to develop broad world knowledge, followed by supervised fine-tuning on instruction-response pairs, and alignment techniques such as RLHF or DPO. Each stage refines the model's helpfulness, accuracy, and safety. facebook's research team — based in United States — has optimized Nougat Small for the specific capability profile described above.
Inference efficiency: Nougat Small at 250M is designed to deliver quality outputs at practical serving speeds. Its context capacity supports complex multi-turn conversations without quality degradation.
Getting started with Nougat Small on LITHOVEX AI takes under two minutes. Follow these steps:
For best results with Nougat Small: provide specific, context-rich prompts; include examples when generating code; specify output format when structure matters; break complex tasks into focused sub-questions.
Scientific paper corpus building for AI training datasets
Automated literature review for research institutions
Math equation extraction from physics and engineering papers
Building searchable databases from PDF research archives
Scientific content indexing for academic search systems
facebook is a leading organization in AI research and large language model development. Their team has built expertise across natural language processing, model architecture design, and alignment research. facebook's models are used by researchers, developers, and enterprises worldwide. Their commitment to advancing AI capability while maintaining responsible deployment practices has made them a respected contributor to the global AI ecosystem. The organization continues to publish research and release models that push the boundaries of what AI systems can achieve.
Founded: 2004, headquartered in United States.
Nougat Small by facebook competes in a field with several strong alternatives. Below is a detailed side-by-side comparison against commonly listed alternatives, using benchmark data and capability profiles in the catalog.
Both Nougat Small and the models above are available free on LITHOVEX AI — test them side by side on your real tasks before committing to a subscription with any provider.
Nougat Small is released under MIT, which means you can download and run it on your own hardware. Below are the quickest ways to get started.
LITHOVEX AI runs Nougat Small on cloud infrastructure, so you can use it instantly in your browser without downloading anything, configuring drivers, or managing VRAM. Create a free account and start in under 60 seconds.
Scientific PDF parsing is a global research need — millions of academic papers published annually need machine-readable text extraction. Standard OCR fails on mathematical equations and scientific formatting that Nougat handles natively.
Nougat Small by facebook has the following version history and notable updates:
For the complete changelog and latest release notes, visit the official facebook model page.