Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a fundamental multimodal task that requires models to jointly understand visual and textual information. Early VQA systems relied heavily on language biases, motivating subsequent work to emphasize visual grounding and balanced datasets. With the success of large-scale pre-trained transformers for both text and vision domains -- such as PhoBERT for Vietnamese language understanding and Vision Transformers (ViT) for image representation learning -- multimodal fusion has achieved remarkable progress. For Vietnamese VQA, several datasets have been introduced to promote research in low-resource multimodal learning, including ViVQA, OpenViVQA, and the recently proposed ViTextVQA. These resources enable benchmarking of models that integrate linguistic and visual features in the Vietnamese context. Evaluation of VQA systems often employs automatic metrics originally designed for image captioning or machine translation, such as BLEU, METEOR, CIDEr, Recall, Precision, and F1-score. However, recent research suggests that large language models can further improve the alignment between automatic evaluation and human judgment in VQA tasks. In this work, we explore Vietnamese Visual Question Answering using transformer-based architectures, leveraging both textual and visual pre-training while systematically comparing automatic evaluation metrics under multilingual settings.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Distribution of Question Types in the QA Pairs Dataset
Figure 2: Example image–question–answer pairs from the AutoViVQA dataset, illustrating the diversity of scenes, question types, and reasoning levels.
In recent decades, artificial intelligence has made significant progress in understanding and interacting with images. One of the important applications of this technology is Visual Question Answering (VQA), a research field that requires computers to understand and answer questions about images in a natural manner. Despite extensive research and development in VQA for English, there have been very few similar efforts made for other languages, especially Vietnamese. This gap presents a significant challenge and opportunity for the advancement of VQA technology in the Vietnamese language context. By bridging this gap, the field of Vietnamese VQA not only enriches the diversity of research in artificial intelligence but also enables practical applications in various domains, such as education, healthcare, and entertainment, catering to Vietnamese-speaking populations worldwide. Thus, the exploration and development of Vietnamese VQA systems hold immense potential for advancing both research and practical applications in the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we propose a Multi-layer Fusing Transformer model utilizing a cross attention module to combine multiple modality features of images and texts from different layers in an aggregated representation. Our architecture allows us extract information from low level to high level. Through detailed experiments and ablation studies, our model achieves promising results against the competitive baselines in ViVQA dataset for Vietnamese language.
Cong Phu Nguyen, Huy Tien Nguyen, Tung Le
Faculty of Information Technology, University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Manual annotation of high-quality visual question answering with grounding (VQA-G) datasets, which pair visual questions with evidential grounding, is crucial for advancing vision-language models (VLMs), but remains unscalable. Existing automated methods are often hindered by two key issues: (1) inconsistent data fidelity due to model hallucinations; (2) brittle verification mechanisms based on simple heuristics. To address these limitations, we introduce AutoVQA-G, a self-improving agentic framework for automated VQA-G annotation. AutoVQA-G employs an iterative refinement loop where a Consistency Evaluation module uses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for fine-grained visual verification. Based on this feedback, a memory-augmented Prompt Optimization agent analyzes critiques from failed samples to progressively refine generation prompts. Our experiments show that AutoVQA-G generates VQA-G datasets with superior visual grounding accuracy compared to leading multimodal LLMs, offering a promising approach for creating high-fidelity data to facilitate more robust VLM training and evaluation. Code: https://github.com/rohnson1999/AutoVQA-G
Rongsheng Hu, Runwei Guan, Yicheng Di +2
School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China · Thrust of Artificial Intelligence, HKUST(GZ), Guangzhou, China
Focusing on low-resource languages is an essential step toward democratizing generative AI. In this work, we contribute to reducing the multimodal NLP resource gap for Romanian. We translate the widely known Flickr30K dataset into Romanian and further extend it for visual question answering by leveraging open-source LLMs. We demonstrate the usefulness of our datasets by fine-tuning open-source VLMs on Romanian visual question answering. We select VLMs from three widely used model families: LLaMA 3.2, LLaVA 1.6, and Qwen2. For fine-tuning, we employ the parameter-efficient LoRA method. Our models show improved Romanian capabilities in visual QA, as well as on tasks they were not trained on, such as Romanian image description generation. The seven-billion-parameter Qwen2-VL-RoVQA obtains top scores on both tasks, with improvements of +2.29% and +4.45% in BERTScore F1 on VQA and captioning, respectively, over its original version. Finally, the models show substantial reductions in grammatical errors compared to their original forms, indicating improvements not only in language understanding but also in Romanian fluency.