arXiv Computation and Language

Not Truly Multilingual: Script Consistency as a Missing Dimension in VLM Evaluation

The paper introduces PuMVR, a benchmark of 1,000 Punjabi image‑text pairs spanning three scripts—Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, and Roman—to evaluate Vision‑Language Models (VLMs). Testing ten state‑of‑the‑art VLMs reveals a significant Script Gap: models perform well in one script but poorly in another, with accuracy differences up to 16%. The authors propose the Script Consistency Rate (SCR) as a new metric, noting it can be as low as 24.8% on their benchmark, and argue that current multilingual VLMs are not truly multi‑script.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Benchmarking and Boosting Multilingual Capabilities of LVLMs via OCR-Centric Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces PM4Bench, a multimodal, multilingual, multi-task benchmark built on a strictly parallel 10‑language corpus, allowing fair cross‑lingual comparison of Large Vision‑Language Models (LVLMs). It also proposes a vision setting that embeds textual inputs directly into images to better mimic real deployment scenarios. Experiments show OCR performance drives cross‑lingual gaps, leading to an OCR‑centric GRPO training strategy that improves multilingual VQA and reduces disparities without costly supervision.

By Junyuan Gao, Jiahe Song, Jiang Wu, Runchuan Zhu, Guanlin Shen, Shasha Wang, Xingjian Wei, Haote Yang, Weijia Li, Bin Wang, Lijun Wu, Conghui He
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

What Can Low Resource Languages Learn From Each Other?

The paper examines OCR adaptation for low‑resource languages, noting that fine‑tuning often hits a performance ceiling in data‑scarce settings. It identifies that lower layers of language‑specific models learn redundant features while higher layers capture script nuances, leading to a structural inefficiency. To address this, the authors propose PSMC, a framework that pre‑trains a base model, specializes it per language, merges the experts via task arithmetic, and co‑trains a unified multilingual backbone, achieving about a 2% improvement in Word Recognition Rate across 10 Indian scripts without adding parameters.

By Achyuth P, Kahaan Shah, Chetan Arora
arXiv AI
Jun 11

AVIS: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 11576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains.

By Ahmadreza Jeddi, Minh Ngoc Le, Amirhossein Kazerouni, Hakki Can Karaimer, Hue Nguyen, Iqbal Mohomed, Michael Brudno, Alex Levinshtein, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Babak Taati, Radek Grzeszczuk
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Many Dialects, Many Languages, One Cultural Lens: Evaluating Multilingual VLMs for Bengali Culture Understanding Across Historically Linked Languages and Regional Dialects

BanglaVerse is a new benchmark that evaluates multilingual vision‑language models on Bengali culture, covering nine visual domains and expanding to four languages and five Bangla dialects for a total of about 32,200 artifacts. It includes visual question answering and captioning tasks built from 1,152 manually curated images. Experiments show that models perform worse on dialectal variants and that missing cultural knowledge, rather than visual grounding, is the main bottleneck.

By Nurul Labib Sayeedi, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Mahbub E Sobhani, Rubaya Tabassum, Ariful Ekraj Hridoy, Mehraj Mahmood, Md. Tarek Hasan, Swakkhar Shatabda
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

CompareBench: A Benchmark for Visual Comparison Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces CompareBench, a new benchmark suite for evaluating visual comparison reasoning in vision‑language models. It includes TallyBench for object counting, OmniCaps for captioning and tagging, and a 1,200‑question CompareBench that tests quantity, geometric, spatial, and temporal comparisons. Experiments on nine closed‑source models show strong overall performance but persistent weaknesses in counting, spatial reasoning, geometric comparison, and temporal ordering, highlighting visual comparison as a systematic challenge for current VLMs.

By Jie Cai