arXiv Computation and Language By Prabhjot Singh, Bhushan Pawar, Madhu Reddiboina, Rajvee Sheth

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

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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.

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