# Multilingual Training and Evaluation Resources for Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18347 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18347/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 28 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07396/) (2016)
- [VLMEvalKit: An Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluating Large Multi-Modality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11691/) (2024)
- [Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17146/) (2024)
- [OBELICS: An Open Web-Scale Filtered Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16527/) (2023)
- [Data and its (dis)contents: A survey of dataset development and use in machine learning research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05345/) (2020)
- [Multi30K: Multilingual English-German Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.00459/) (2016)
- [Large image datasets: A pyrrhic win for computer vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16923/) (2020)
- [MTVQA: Benchmarking Multilingual Text-Centric Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11985/) (2024)
- [Scaling Text-Rich Image Understanding via Code-Guided Synthetic Multimodal Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14846/) (2025)
- [The Forgotten Margins of AI Ethics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04221/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieved rapid progress in the recent years. However, despite their growth, VLMs development is heavily grounded on English, leading to two main limitations: (i) the lack of multilingual and multimodal datasets for training, and (ii) the scarcity of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks across languages. In this work, we address these gaps by introducing a new comprehensive suite of resources for VLMs training and evaluation spanning five European languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). We adopt a regeneration-translation paradigm that produces high-quality cross-lingual resources by combining curated synthetic generation and manual annotation. Specifically, we build Multi-PixMo, a training corpus obtained regenerating examples from Pixmo pre-existing datasets with permissively licensed models: PixMo-Cap, PixMo-AskModelAnything, and CoSyn-400k. On the evaluation side, we construct a set of multilingual benchmarks derived translating widely used English datasets (MMbench, ScienceQA, MME, POPE, AI2D). We assess the quality of these resources through qualitative and quantitative human analyses, measuring inter-annotator agreement. Additionally, we perform ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of multilingual data, with respect to English only, in VLMs training. Experiments, comprising 3 different models show that using multilingual, multimodal examples for training VLMs aids is consistently beneficial on non-English benchmarks, with positive transfer to English as well.