Important: The default branch is main, which tracks active development and may be ahead of the latest supported release.

For the latest supported release, use the 26.08 branch (GA PyPI and Helm chart version 26.8.1). The previous stable line is 26.03.

See the corresponding NeMo Retriever Library documentation.

NeMo Retriever Library

NeMo Retriever Library is a scalable, performance-oriented framework for document content and metadata extraction. It supports both NVIDIA NIM microservices and a wide range of models to find, contextualize, and extract text, tables, charts, and infographics for use in downstream generative and retrieval-augmented applications.

[!Note] NeMo Retriever extraction is also referred to as NVIDIA Ingest in some NVIDIA product materials.

NeMo Retriever Library enables parallelization of splitting documents into pages where artifacts are classified (such as text, tables, charts, and infographics), extracted, and further contextualized through optical character recognition (OCR) into a well defined JSON schema. From there, NeMo Retriever Library manages computaiton of embeddings for the extracted content as well as storing them in LanceDB.

The following diagram shows the NeMo Retriever Library pipeline.

For production-level performance and scalability, deploy the pipeline and supporting NIMs on Kubernetes using Helm — start with the NeMo Retriever Helm chart and the NeMo Retriever Library (prerequisites / deployment) for published charts and install procedures. For standalone service-image builds, see Docker Service Image.

Note: Along with the recent repo name change, we're phasing out legacy ingestion APIs and simplifying the dependencies. You can follow this work and see the forward looking API via the nemo_retriever library subfolder.

Typical Use

For small-scale workloads, such as workloads of fewer than 100 PDFs, you can use our in development library setup which works with HuggingFace models on local GPUs or with NIMs hosted on build.nvidia.com.

After following the quickstart installation steps, you can start ingesting content like with the following snippet:

from nemo_retriever import create_ingestor
from nemo_retriever.common.io import to_markdown, to_markdown_by_page
from pathlib import Path

documents = [str(Path("data/multimodal_test.pdf"))]
ingestor = create_ingestor(run_mode="batch")

# ingestion tasks are chainable and defined lazily
ingestor = (
  ingestor.files(documents)
  .extract(
    # below are the default values, but content types can be controlled
    extract_text=True,
    extract_charts=True,
    extract_tables=True,
    extract_infographics=True
  )
  .embed()
  .vdb_upload()
)

# ingestor.ingest() actually executes the pipeline
chunks = ingestor.ingest()  # pandas.DataFrame (batch and inprocess)

You can fetch supported content directly from HTTP and HTTPS URLs. URL requests run lazily when you call .ingest(). Results retain the submitted URL in source identity fields, including after redirects.

from nemo_retriever import create_ingestor

urls = [
  "https://ontheline.trincoll.edu/images/bookdown/sample-local-pdf.pdf",
]

results, failures = (
  create_ingestor(run_mode="batch")
  .urls(urls)
  .extract()
  .embed()
  .vdb_upload()
  .ingest(return_failures=True)
)

Pass UrlFetchParams to .urls() to configure shared request headers, the request timeout, redirect handling, response-size limits, and concurrency. HTML responses use the same MarkItDown conversion as local .html files. Refer to the Python API guide for defaults and failure behavior.

You can see the extracted text that represents the content of the ingested test document.

# page 1 raw text:
>>> chunks.iloc[0]["text"]
'TestingDocument\r\nA sample document with headings and placeholder text\r\nIntroduction\r\nThis is a placeholder document that can be used for any purpose...'

# markdown formatted table from the first page
>>> chunks.iloc[1]["text"]
'| Table | 1 |\n| This | table | describes | some | animals, | and | some | activities | they | might | be | doing | in | specific |\n| locations. |\n| Animal | Activity | Place |\n| Giraffe | Driving | a | car | At | the | beach |\n| Lion | Putting | on | sunscreen | At | the | park |\n| Cat | Jumping | onto | a | laptop | In | a | home | office |\n| Dog | Chasing | a | squirrel | In | the | front | yard |\n| Chart | 1 |'

# a chart from the first page
>>> chunks.iloc[2]["text"]
'Chart 1\nThis chart shows some gadgets, and some very fictitious costs.\nGadgets and their cost\n$160.00\n$140.00\n$120.00\n$100.00\nDollars\n$80.00\n$60.00\n$40.00\n$20.00\n$-\nPowerdrill\nBluetooth speaker\nMinifridge\nPremium desk fan\nHammer\nCost'

# markdown formatting for full pages or documents:
# per-page markdown is keyed by page number
>>> to_markdown_by_page(chunks).keys()
dict_keys([1, 2, 3])

>>> to_markdown_by_page(chunks)[1]
'TestingDocument\r\nA sample document with headings and placeholder text\r\nIntroduction\r\nThis is a placeholder document that can be used for any purpose. It contains some \r\nheadings and some placeholder text to fill the space. The text is not important and contains \r\nno real value, but it is useful for testing. Below, we will have some simple tables and charts \r\nthat we can use to confirm Ingest is working as expected.\r\nTable 1\r\nThis table describes some animals, and some activities they might be doing in specific \r\nlocations.\r\nAnimal Activity Place\r\nGira@e Driving a car At the beach\r\nLion Putting on sunscreen At the park\r\nCat Jumping onto a laptop In a home o@ice\r\nDog Chasing a squirrel In the front yard\r\nChart 1\r\nThis chart shows some gadgets, and some very fictitious costs.\n\n| This | table | describes | some | animals, | and | some | activities | they | might | be | doing | in | specific |\n| locations. |\n| Animal | Activity | Place |\n| Giraffe | Driving | a | car | At | the | beach |\n| Lion | Putting | on | sunscreen | At | the | park |\n| Cat | Jumping | onto | a | laptop | In | a | home | office |\n| Dog | Chasing | a | squirrel | In | the | front | yard |\n| Chart | 1 |\n\nChart 1 This chart shows some gadgets, and some very fictitious costs. Gadgets and their cost $160.00 $140.00 $120.00 $100.00 Dollars $80.00 $60.00 $40.00 $20.00 $- Powerdrill Bluetooth speaker Minifridge Premium desk fan Hammer Cost\n\n### Table 1\n\n| This | table | describes | some | animals, | and | some | activities | they | might | be | doing | in | specific |\n| locations. |\n| Animal | Activity | Place |\n| Giraffe | Driving | a | car | At | the | beach |\n| Lion | Putting | on | sunscreen | At | the | park |\n| Cat | Jumping | onto | a | laptop | In | a | home | office |\n| Dog | Chasing | a | squirrel | In | the | front | yard |\n| Chart | 1 |\n\n### Chart 1\n\nChart 1 This chart shows some gadgets, and some very fictitious costs. Gadgets and their cost $160.00 $140.00 $120.00 $100.00 Dollars $80.00 $60.00 $40.00 $20.00 $- Powerdrill Bluetooth speaker Minifridge Premium desk fan Hammer Cost\n\n### Table 2\n\n| This | table | describes | some | animals, | and | some | activities | they | might | be | doing | in | specific |\n| locations. |\n| Animal | Activity | Place |\n| Giraffe | Driving | a | car | At | the | beach |\n| Lion | Putting | on | sunscreen | At | the | park |\n| Cat | Jumping | onto | a | laptop | In | a | home | office |\n| Dog | Chasing | a | squirrel | In | the | front | yard |\n| Chart | 1 |\n\n### Chart 2\n\nChart 1 This chart shows some gadgets, and some very fictitious costs. Gadgets and their cost $160.00 $140.00 $120.00 $100.00 Dollars $80.00 $60.00 $40.00 $20.00 $- Powerdrill Bluetooth speaker Minifridge Premium desk fan Hammer Cost\n\n### Table 3\n\n| This | table | describes | some | animals, | and | some | activities | they | might | be | doing | in | specific |\n| locations. |\n| Animal | Activity | Place |\n| Giraffe | Driving | a | car | At | the | beach |\n| Lion | Putting | on | sunscreen | At | the | park |\n| Cat | Jumping | onto | a | laptop | In | a | home | office |\n| Dog | Chasing | a | squirrel | In | the | front | yard |\n| Chart | 1 |\n\n### Chart 3\n\nChart 1 This chart shows some gadgets, and some very fictitious costs. Gadgets and their cost $160.00 $140.00 $120.00 $100.00 Dollars $80.00 $60.00 $40.00 $20.00 $- Powerdrill Bluetooth speaker Minifridge Premium desk fan Hammer Cost'

# full document markdown is a single string (or None if empty)
>>> to_markdown(chunks)[:50]
'# Extracted Content\n\n## Page 1\n\nTestingDocument\r\nA s'

Query Ingested Content

To query for relevant snippets of the ingested content, and use them with an LLM to generate answers, use the following code.

from nemo_retriever.graph.retriever import Retriever
from openai import OpenAI
import os

retriever = Retriever()

query = "Given their activities, which animal is responsible for the typos in my documents?"

# you can also submit a list with retriever.queries([...])
hits = retriever.query(query)

client = OpenAI(
  base_url = "https://integrate.api.nvidia.com/v1",
  api_key = os.environ.get("NVIDIA_API_KEY")
)

hit_texts = [hit["text"] for hit in hits]
prompt = f"""
Given the following retrieved documents, answer the question: {query}

Documents:
{hit_texts}
"""

completion = client.chat.completions.create(
  model="nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b",
  messages=[{"role":"user","content":prompt}],
  stream=False
)

answer = completion.choices[0].message.content
print(answer)

Answer:

Cat is the animal whose activity (jumping onto a laptop) matches the location of the typos, so the cat is responsible for the typos in the documents.

[!TIP] Beyond inspecting the results, you can read them into things like llama-index or langchain retrieval pipelines.

Please also checkout our demo using a retrieval pipeline on build.nvidia.com to query over document content pre-extracted w/ NVIDIA Ingest.

Documentation Resources

• Official Documentation - Complete user guides, API references, and deployment instructions
• Getting Started Guide - Overview and prerequisites for production deployments
• Stage Benchmarking - Internal per-stage throughput measurements
• MIG Deployment - Multi-Instance GPU configurations for Kubernetes
• API Documentation - Python client and API reference

Notices

Third Party License Notice:

If configured to do so, this project will download and install additional third-party open source software projects. Review the license terms of these open source projects before use:

https://pypi.org/project/pdfservices-sdk/

• INSTALL_ADOBE_SDK:
  • Description: If set to true, the Adobe SDK will be installed in the container at launch time. This is required if you want to use the Adobe extraction service for PDF decomposition. Please review the license agreement for the pdfservices-sdk before enabling this option.
• Default embedding tokenizer:

  • Description: Published NeMo Retriever service images pre-cache the revision-pinned tokenizer for the default embedding model, currently nvidia/Nemotron-3-Embed-1B-BF16, so TXT and HTML splitting does not need network access at runtime. The model is governed by the OpenMDW License Agreement, version 1.1 and identifies the Apache License, Version 2.0, as additional information.

    Source builds opt in to the same pinned tokenizer cache with --build-arg DOWNLOAD_DEFAULT_TOKENIZER=True. The default tokenizer repository is not gated, so this download does not require a Hugging Face access token.

Before contributing to this project, please review our Contributor Guide.

Security Considerations

• NeMo Retriever Extraction doesn't generate any code that may require sandboxing.
• NeMo Retriever Extraction is shared as a reference and is provided "as is". The security in the production environment is the responsibility of the end users deploying it. When deploying in a production environment, please have security experts review any potential risks and threats; define the trust boundaries, implement logging and monitoring capabilities, secure the communication channels, integrate AuthN & AuthZ with appropriate access controls, keep the deployment up to date, ensure the containers/source code are secure and free of known vulnerabilities.
• A frontend that handles AuthN & AuthZ should be in place as missing AuthN & AuthZ could provide ungated access to customer models if directly exposed to e.g. the internet, resulting in either cost to the customer, resource exhaustion, or denial of service.
• NeMo Retriever Extraction doesn't require any privileged access to the system.
• The end users are responsible for ensuring the availability of their deployment.
• The end users are responsible for building the container images and keeping them up to date.
• The end users are responsible for ensuring that OSS packages used by the developer blueprint are current.
• The logs from nginx proxy, backend, and demo app are printed to standard out. They can include input prompts and output completions for development purposes. The end users are advised to handle logging securely and avoid information leakage for production use cases.