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Anshul Singh

Publications and source records attributed to Anshul Singh.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

M4-RAG: A Massive-Scale Multilingual Multi-Cultural Multimodal RAG

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance in visual question answering (VQA), yet they remain constrained by static training data. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates this limitation by enabling access to up-to-date, culturally grounded, and multilingual information; however, multilingual multimodal RAG remains largely underexplored. We introduce M4-RAG, a massive-scale benchmark spanning 42 languages, 56 regional dialects and registers, and 189 countries, comprising over 80,000 culturally diverse image-question pairs for evaluating retrieval-augmented VQA across languages and modalities. To balance realism with reproducibility, we build a controlled retrieval environment containing millions of carefully curated multilingual documents relevant to the query domains, approximating real-world retrieval conditions while ensuring consistent experimentation. Our systematic evaluation reveals that although RAG consistently benefits smaller VLMs, it fails to scale to larger models and often even degrades their performance, exposing a critical mismatch between model size and current retrieval effectiveness. Our cross-lingual evaluations also reveal significant performance degradation when prompts or retrieved context are provided in non-English languages. The code, datasets, and evaluation protocols for M4-RAG are available as open-source at https://github.com/davidanugraha/M4-RAG.

cs.CL

Lost in Translation and Noise: A Deep Dive into the Failure Modes of VLMs on Real-World Tables

The impressive performance of VLMs is largely measured on benchmarks that fail to capture the complexities of real-world scenarios. Existing datasets for tabular QA, such as WikiTableQuestions and FinQA, are overwhelmingly monolingual (English) and present tables in a digitally perfect, clean format. This creates a significant gap between research and practice. To address this, we present \textbf{MirageTVQA}, a new benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs on these exact dimensions. Featuring nearly 60,000 QA pairs across 24 languages, MirageTVQA challenges models with tables that are not only multilingual but also visually imperfect, incorporating realistic noise to mimic scanned documents. Our evaluation of the leading VLMs reveals two primary failure points: a severe degradation in performance (over 35\% drop for the best models) when faced with visual noise and a consistent English-first bias where reasoning abilities fail to transfer to other languages. MirageTVQA provides a benchmark for measuring and driving progress towards more robust VLM models for table reasoning. The dataset and the code are available at: https://github.com/anshulsc/MirageTVQA.

cs.CL

MTabVQA: Evaluating Multi-Tabular Reasoning of Language Models in Visual Space

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in interpreting visual layouts and text. However, a significant challenge remains in their ability to interpret robustly and reason over multi-tabular data presented as images, a common occurrence in real-world scenarios like web pages and digital documents. Existing benchmarks typically address single tables or non-visual data (text/structured). This leaves a critical gap: they don't assess the ability to parse diverse table images, correlate information across them, and perform multi-hop reasoning on the combined visual data. We introduce MTabVQA, a novel benchmark specifically designed for multi-tabular visual question answering to bridge that gap. MTabVQA comprises 3,745 complex question-answer pairs that necessitate multi-hop reasoning across several visually rendered table images. We provide extensive benchmark results for state-of-the-art VLMs on MTabVQA, revealing significant performance limitations. We further investigate post-training techniques to enhance these reasoning abilities and release MTabVQA-Instruct, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset. Our experiments show that fine-tuning VLMs with MTabVQA-Instruct substantially improves their performance on visual multi-tabular reasoning. Code and dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/mtabvqa/MTabVQA-Eval) are available online (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MTabVQA-EMNLP-B16E).

cs.CV