AutoViVQA: A Large-Scale Automatically Constructed Dataset for Vietnamese Visual Question Answering
Organizations: Faculty of Information Technology, University of Science, VNU-HCM, Vietnam · Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Abstract
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
| Criteria | AutoViVQA (Ours) | VQA v2 [ 14 ] | OpenViVQA [ 5 ] | ViCLEVR [ 15 ] | ViOCRVQA [ 16 ] | ViTextVQA [ 17 ] |
| Language | Vietnamese (Vi) | English (En) | Vietnamese (Vi) | Vietnamese (Vi) | Vietnamese (Vi) | Vietnamese (Vi) |
| Images | 19,411 (MS COCO) | 204,721 (MS COCO) | 11,199 (Vietnamese images) | 26,216 (Synthetic images) | 28,282 (Book covers) | 16,762 (Scene text) |
| QA Pairs | 37,077 Q / 185,385 A (5 A/Q) | 1.1M Q / 11M A | 37,914 Q / 37,914 A | 30,000 Q / 30,000 A | 123,781 Q / 123,781 A | 50,342 Q / 50,342 A |
| Annotation Method | Semi-automatic (LLM / Gemini-2.5-Flash) | Manual annotation | Manual annotation (Crowd-sourcing) | Semi-automatic (Grammar-based) | Semi-automatic (Metadata / Template-based) | Manual annotation |
| Question Types | 9 focused types (Relation, Causal, Spatial, Counting, etc.) | Mainly 3 basic types (Yes/No, Number, Other) | Open (Text QA & Non-text QA) | 6 diagnostic types (Color, Size, Shape, Material, Count, Comparison) | 5 focused types (Title, Author, Publisher, Translator, Genre) | Text-based QA (Scene text only) |
| Reasoning Level | 5 levels (Compositional, Commonsense/Causal, Text-in-Image) | General reasoning | Open / Semantic reasoning | Visual reasoning (Compositional) | Text understanding (OCR-VQA) | Scene text comprehension |
| Scene | Caption Variants | Conversation Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Kayak on water | Two kayaks on calm water; Kayakers enjoying peaceful lake; Watercraft near shoreline | Q: Which kayak is closer to shore? A: The red one on the left; Q: What activity are people doing? A: Kayaking |
| Elephant and tree | Elephant reaching for leaves; Wildlife feeding behavior; Tree interaction scene | Q: What is the elephant doing? A: Eating leaves from tree; Q: Is this in the wild? A: Yes |
| Category | Reasoning Levels |
|---|---|
| Object / Attribute Identification | Level 1 |
| Location / Spatial Description | Level 2 |
| Action Description | Levels 2–3 |
| Counting | Levels 1–3 |
| Yes/No Question | Levels 1–5 |
| Comparisons | Levels 2–5 |
| Model | Acc | Prec | Rec | F1 | BLEU | ROUGE | METEOR | CIDEr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vintern (base) | 0.0012 | 0.1752 | 0.1987 | 0.1755 | 0.0191 | 0.2584 | 0.2393 | 0.0854 |
| Vintern (finetune) | 0.1301 | 0.5247 | 0.5512 | 0.5376 | 0.0611 | 0.5193 | 0.3525 | 0.7284 |
| ViT5_ViT | 0.0797 | 0.4684 | 0.5033 | 0.4852 | 0.0413 | 0.4689 | 0.3102 | 0.7268 |
| BARTPhoBEiT | 0.0881 | 0.4530 | 0.4648 | 0.4588 | 0.4329 | 0.4483 | 0.2457 | 1.8896 |
| GPT 5 | 0.1084 | 0.4720 | 0.5520 | 0.5089 | 0.0607 | 0.4730 | 0.3334 | 0.8420 |
| LLaMA 3.2 | 0.0036 | 0.2396 | 0.7371 | 0.3616 | 0.0362 | 0.3611 | 0.3001 | 0.6284 |
Visual Question Answering
Visual Question Answering (VQA) develops systems that answer natural-language questions about images, videos, and visual documents.
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