Somraj Gautam


2026

We introduce INDOTABVQA, a benchmark for evaluating cross-lingual Table Visual Question Answering (VQA) on real-world document images in Bahasa Indonesia. The dataset comprises 1,593 document images across three visual styles (bordered, borderless, and colorful) with one or more tables, and 1,593 question-answer sets in four languages: Bahasa Indonesia, English, Hindi, and Arabic. This enables evaluation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in both monolingual (Bahasa documents with Bahasa questions) and cross-lingual settings (Bahasa documents with questions in other languages). We benchmark leading open-source VLMs (Qwen2.5-VL, Gemma- 3, LLaMA-3.2) and GPT-4o and reveal substantial performance gaps, particularly on structurally complex tables and in low-resource languages. Fine-tuning a compact 3B model and a LoRA- finetuned 7B model on our dataset yields 11.6% and 17.8% improvements in accuracy. Providing explicit table region coordinates as additional input further improves performance by 4-7%, demonstrating the value of Spatial priors for table-based reasoning. Our findings underscore the importance of language- diverse, domain-specific datasets and demonstrate that targeted fine-tuning can significantly enhance VLM performance on specialized document understanding tasks. INDOTABVQA provides a valuable resource for advancing research in cross-lingual, structure-aware document understanding, especially in underrepresented regions of the world. The dataset is publicly available via Hugging Face at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/NusaBharat/INDOTABVQA.

2025

We introduce MMCRICBENCH-3K, a benchmark for Visual Question Answering (VQA) on cricket scorecards, designed to evaluate large vision-language models (LVLMs) on complex numerical and cross-lingual reasoning over semi-structured tabular images. MMCRICBENCH-3K comprises 1,463 synthetically generated scorecard images from ODI, T20, and Test formats, accompanied by 1,500 English QA pairs. It includes two subsets: MMCRICBENCH-E-1.5K, featuring English scorecards, and MMCRICBENCH-H1.5K, containing visually similar Hindi scorecards, with all questions and answers kept in English to enable controlled cross-script evaluation. The task demands reasoning over structured numerical data, multi-image context, and implicit domain knowledge. Empirical results show that even state-of-the-art LVLMs, such as GPT-4o and Qwen2.5VL, struggle on the English subset despite it being their primary training language and exhibit a further drop in performance on the Hindi subset. This reveals key limitations in structure-aware visual text understanding, numerical reasoning, and cross-lingual generalization. The dataset is publicly available via Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/ datasets/DIALab/MMCricBench, to promote LVLM research in this direction.
Reaching a human-level understanding of real-world documents necessitates effective machine reading comprehension, yet recent developments in this area often struggle with table images. In response, we introduce the Visual Table Reading Comprehension (TabComp) dataset, which includes table images, questions, and generative answers designed to evaluate OCR-free models. Unlike general Visual Question Answering (VQA) datasets, TabComp uniquely focuses on table images, fostering the development of systems which obviate the use of optical character recognition (OCR) technology, which often struggles with complex table layouts. Our findings reveal that current OCR-free models perform poorly on TabComp, highlighting the need for robust, specialized models for accurate table reading comprehension. We propose TabComp as a benchmark for evaluating OCR-free models in table reading comprehension and encourage the research community to collaborate on developing more effective solutions. The code and data are available at - https://github.com/dialabiitj/TabComp/