# AMALIA-VL: A Native European Portuguese Open-Source Vision and Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19100 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19100/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
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- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
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- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
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- [OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07895/) (2023)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [InfographicVQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12756/) (2021)
- [Visual Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08669/) (2016)
- [LMMs-Eval: Reality Check on the Evaluation of Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12772/) (2024)
- [Demystifying CLIP Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16671/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision-1.5: Fully Open Framework for Democratized Multimodal Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23661/) (2025)
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- [TallyQA: Answering Complex Counting Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12440/) (2018)
- [Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10611/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open-source multimodal models, which either conflate it with Brazilian Portuguese or severely under-represent it in their training data mixes. We introduce AMALIA-VL, the first open-source instruction-tuned LVLM built natively for pt-PT, pairing a high-resolution vision encoder with dynamic image tiling and a fully open pt-PT-optimized language model via a learned connector. We contribute with a purposefully designed three-stage training process - vision-language alignment, general visual instruction tuning, and preference optimization - together with a pt-PT-centric multimodal data mix combining curated and translated public datasets with novel datasets that address the near-total absence of European Portuguese multimodal resources. Our evaluation shows that AMALIA-VL establishes a strong baseline for open-source pt-PT LVLMs. We will release model weights, training data, and construction pipelines along with machine-translated pt-PT evaluation benchmarks to help democratize pt-PT LVLM development.