Sarashina2-Vision-8B

Sarashina2-Vision-8B is a Japanese large vision-language model trained by SB Intuitions, the AI research arm of SoftBank. It combines the Sarashina2-7B language model with the image encoder of Qwen2-VL-7B, targeting Japanese document and image understanding.

The vendor reports top scores among Japanese VLMs on four benchmarks as of March 2025. The Sarashina family is trained with NVIDIA Nemotron tooling, and Sarashina3 mini was later selected by Japan's Digital Agency. Note the licensing: Sarashina models ship under the Sarashina Model NonCommercial License Agreement, so commercial use requires a separate arrangement.