Ostrakon-VL is the first open-source Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) specifically designed for Food-Service and Retail Store (FSRS) scenarios. It delivers state-of-the-art performance in real-world retail perception, compliance, and decision-making tasks — outperforming even much larger general-purpose models like Qwen3-VL-235B.
🔥 Key Highlights
60.5 average score on ShopBench (Ostrakon-VL-30B-A3B) — outperforming Qwen3-VL-235B by +1.1
ShopBench: First public benchmark for FSRS, with multi-format inputs and diagnostic metrics
🧪 ShopBench: The first public benchmark for FSRS, featuring:
Scenarios: ShopFront, ShopInterior, Kitchen
Input Types: Single image, multi-image, video
Output Formats: Open-ended QA, structured Format, MCQ
Unique Design: High visual complexity (13.0 objects/image), fine-grained task taxonomy (79 categories), and diagnostic metrics (VNR/VIF) to minimize language bias
🧪 ShopBench: The First Public Benchmark for FSRS
ShopBench is the first standardized evaluation suite specifically designed for the Food-Service and Retail Store (FSRS) domain. Unlike general-purpose multimodal benchmarks, ShopBench addresses the unique challenges of real-world retail environments:
Multi-format Inputs: Unifies evaluation across single-image, multi-image, and video scenarios under a consistent protocol.
Fine-grained Taxonomy: Organizes tasks into a 4-level hierarchy covering perception (e.g., OCR, object localization) and reasoning (e.g., spatial relations, compliance rules), with 79 leaf-level categories.
Real-world Complexity: Features the highest instance density (13.0 objects/image) among major benchmarks, reflecting cluttered retail scenes.
Reduced Language Bias: Employs diagnostic metrics like Visual Necessity Rate (VNR) and Vision-Induced Failure (VIF) to ensure questions truly require visual understanding, not just language priors.
Domain Distinctiveness: t-SNE visualization shows ShopBench occupies a distinct region in the visual embedding space compared to existing benchmarks (e.g., MMBench, OCRBench).
ShopBench enables fair, interpretable, and actionable comparison of MLLMs in realistic FSRS workflows — from storefront compliance checks to kitchen hygiene audits.
Due to legal reasons, the open-sourcing of ShopBench has been postponed.
📊 Evaluation Results
ShopBench Performance (Higher is better)
Our Ostrakon-VL models achieve strong performance on ShopBench. Ostrakon-VL-8B reaches an average score of 60.1, showing competitive results among open-source models of similar scale, while Ostrakon-VL-30B-A3B further improves to 60.5 and performs particularly well on ShopFront (65.3) and Video (57.3), demonstrating strong understanding of e-commerce scenarios.
General Benchmarks
While specialized for FSRS, On representative multimodal benchmarks, Ostrakon-VL shows competitive overall performance across a wide range of tasks. In particular, Ostrakon-VL-30B-A3B achieves strong results on MMBench-EN_DEV (86.7) and AI2D_TEST (86.9), while maintaining solid performance across OCR, math, and Chinese-language benchmarks, demonstrating its broad multimodal capabilities.
🧠 Training Strategy
Ostrakon-VL is trained via a multi-stage training strategy:
If you find Ostrakon-VL or ShopBench useful in your research, please cite our paper:
@article{shen2026ostrakon,
title={Ostrakon-VL: Towards Domain-Expert MLLM for Food-Service and Retail Stores},
author={Shen, Zhiyong and Zhao, Gongpeng and Zhou, Jun and Yu, Li and Kou, Guandong and Li, Jichen and Dong, Chuanlei and Li, Zuncheng and Li, Kaimao and Wei, Bingkun and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.21342},
year={2026}
}
🤝 Contributing & License
We welcome contributions! Please open an issue or submit a PR.