VisTai: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Traditional Chinese in Taiwan

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for Visual Language Models (VLM) in Traditional Chinese. Our evaluation suite, the first of its kind, contains two complementary components: (1) VisTai-MCQ, a collection of manually curated exam multi-choice questions from 21 academic subjects designed to test the broad knowledge and reasoning capabilities of VLMs; and (2) VisTai-Dialogue, an open dialogue benchmark comprising 131 image-question pairs manually created to evaluate VLMs' ability in free-form dialogue generation within Taiwanese cultural contexts. These benchmarks address a critical gap in the evaluation landscape, where existing benchmarks predominantly focus on English or Simplified Chinese, neglecting the unique linguistic and cultural aspects of Traditional Chinese used in regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong. Our analysis reveals significant performance differences across various VLMs and highlights specific challenges in processing Traditional Chinese visual content.