PalmLeaf-VQA: A Multi-Script Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Historical Palm-Leaf Manuscript Understanding Across Diverse Regions

Historical manuscripts remain largely absent from modern vision-language benchmarks, leaving open how well multimodal large language models (MLLMs) handle culturally diverse, degraded, and non-Latin document images. We introduce PalmLeaf-VQA, a multi-script visual question answering benchmark for historical palm-leaf manuscript understanding across South and Southeast Asian traditions. PalmLeaf-VQA contains 923 curated manuscript images and 7,384 question--answer pairs from eight collection groups: Balinese, Grantha, Jathakam, Kambaramayanam, Kannada, Khmer, Sundanese, and Tamil. Unlike recognition-oriented resources, the benchmark targets manuscript-aware visual reasoning over preservation-relevant cues, including physical condition, line structure, material and coating, binding holes, margins, symbols, drawings, and localized visual artifacts. We evaluate recent proprietary and open-weight MLLMs under open-answer and constrained-answer prompting and provide fine-grained analysis across collections, question categories, and task types. The strongest evaluated model reaches only 58.00% exact-match accuracy on the held-out test split, revealing substantial limitations in current MLLMs for rare-script, degraded-layout, and preservation-oriented document understanding. PalmLeaf-VQA provides a standardized benchmark for advancing culturally grounded and layout-aware multimodal document analysis.