Jako Tako or Fluent? Presenting PoVisLE: A Polish Vision-Language Evaluation

Anna Kołos, Grzegorz Statkiewicz, Karolina Seweryn, Katarzyna Kowol, Karolina Piosek, Wojciech Kusa


Abstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on tasks such as image captioning, visual question answering, and image-to-text generation. However, they are predominantly trained on English-centric data, which limits their ability to handle culturally grounded visual understanding and leads to failures in interpreting region-specific meanings, symbolic content, and context-dependent visual cues. Existing benchmarks for cultural competence are often template-driven and focused on surface-level recognition, making them insufficient for evaluating deeper linguistic and pragmatic understanding in culturally situated settings. We introduce PoVisLE, a monocultural vision-language benchmark for Polish designed to evaluate culturally grounded multimodal understanding under a grounded evaluation paradigm, where language is interpreted in interaction with visual context. The dataset contains 1,117 images and 2,366 manually annotated VQA pairs. Overall, our dataset provides a controlled and challenging resource for assessing culturally grounded vision-language understanding beyond surface-level recognition.1
Anthology ID:
2026.oracle-main.4
Volume:
The Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Reasoning Across Cultures Languages (ORACLE)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Leonardo Ranaldi, Giulia Pucci, Federico Ranaldi, Marco Valentino, Alexandra Birch, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto
Venues:
ORACLE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
47–74
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.oracle-main.4/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anna Kołos, Grzegorz Statkiewicz, Karolina Seweryn, Katarzyna Kowol, Karolina Piosek, and Wojciech Kusa. 2026. Jako Tako or Fluent? Presenting PoVisLE: A Polish Vision-Language Evaluation. In The Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Reasoning Across Cultures Languages (ORACLE), pages 47–74, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Jako Tako or Fluent? Presenting PoVisLE: A Polish Vision-Language Evaluation (Kołos et al., ORACLE 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.oracle-main.4.pdf