MTVQA-Test
Models answer 6,778 expert-written questions about text in 2,116 images across 9 languages, such as Arabic, Japanese, and Thai. Scoring is accuracy.
Humans score 79.7 in the paper, far above the models tested at release.
In the authors’ words
Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) in its proper format not only facilitates human-machine interaction in text-centric visual environments but also serves as a de facto gold proxy to evaluate AI models in the domain of text-centric scene understanding. Nonetheless, most existing TEC-VQA benchmarks have focused on high-resource languages like English and Chinese. Despite pioneering works to expand multilingual QA pairs in non-text-centric VQA datasets through translation engines, the translation-based protocol encounters a substantial "visual-textual misalignment" problem when applied to TEC-VQA. Specifically, it prioritizes the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding the visual text present in images. Moreover, it fails to address complexities related to nuanced meaning, contextual distortion, language bias, and question-type diversity. In this work, we tackle multilingual TEC-VQA by introducing MTVQA, the first benchmark featuring high-quality human expert annotations across 9 diverse languages, consisting of 6,778 question-answer pairs across 2,116 images. Further, by comprehensively evaluating numerous state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), including Qwen2-VL, GPT-4o, GPT-4V, Claude3, and Gemini, on the MTVQA benchmark, it is evident that there is still a large room for performance improvement (Qwen2-VL scoring 30.9 versus 79.7 for human performance), underscoring the value of MTVQA. Additionally, we supply multilingual training data within the MTVQA dataset, demonstrating that straightforward fine-tuning with this data can substantially enhance multilingual TEC-VQA performance. We aspire that MTVQA will offer the research community fresh insights and stimulate further exploration in multilingual visual text comprehension. The project homepage is available at https://bytedance.github.io/MTVQA/.
- Level
- Everyday Most adults, without training
- Scored
- Checked automatically A program checks the result against an answer key, unit tests or the expected final state.
- Answers
- Short answer A number, word or short string matched to a key.
Qwen 3.8 Max leads with 56.6% among models released by Aug 2026
Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.
The newest model with a score here came out in Aug 2026, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:
- GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5.5
- GPT-6.1 Terra
- GPT-6.1 Sol
- and 16 more
- 1
Qwen 3.8 Max 56.6%
- 2
Seed2.0 Pro 51.1%
- 3
InternVL3.5-241B-A28B 39.3%
- 4
Qwen2.5-VL-72B 31.7%
- 5
Nemotron Nano 12B v2 VL 24.3%
- 6
Aya Vision 32B 23.5%
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | | 56.6% | Aug 2026 | Model card | |
| 2 | | 51.1% | Feb 2026 | Model card | |
| 3 | | 39.3% | Aug 2025 | Model card | |
| 4 | | 31.7% | Feb 2025 | Model card | |
| 5 | | 24.3% | Nov 2025 | Model card | |
| 6 | | 23.5% | May 2025 | Model card |
The benchmark's own leaderboard has 26 entries, 18 of them models we track. We plot every source in the charts below.
4 models have held number one since its release in May 2024
Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release. We draw one row each for the benchmark’s own leaderboard and what labs claim in their cards.
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Labs headline it less often now, last in Aug 2026
Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 Aug 2026 | 56.6 | MTVQA-Test | |
| 25 Aug 2025 | 39.3 | MTVQA |
5 system cards report it, from 5 labs
Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14 Feb 2026 | | 51.1 | MTVQA, DeepSeek-V3-0324 judge (Table 8) | Capabilities |
| 6 Nov 2025 | | 24.3 | MTVQA Avg, reasoning off (Table 5) | Capabilities |
| 25 Aug 2025 | | 39.3 | MTVQA (avg) (Table 2, Table 8) | Capabilities |
| 13 May 2025 | | 23.5 | MTVQA, VQA score, Aya Vision languages (Table 4) | Capabilities |
| 19 Feb 2025 | | 31.7 | MTVQA (Table 3) | Capabilities |
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