Abstract
Understanding signboard text in natural scenes is essential for real-world applications of Visual Question Answering (VQA), yet remains underexplored, particularly in low-resource languages. We introduce ViSignVQA, the first large-scale Vietnamese dataset designed for signboard-oriented VQA, which comprises 10,762 images and 25,573 question-answer pairs. The dataset captures the diverse linguistic, cultural, and visual characteristics of Vietnamese signboards, including bilingual text, informal phrasing, and visual elements such as color and layout. To benchmark this task, we adapted state-of-the-art VQA models (e.g., BLIP-2, LaTr, PreSTU, and SaL) by integrating a Vietnamese OCR model (SwinTextSpotter) and a Vietnamese pretrained language model (ViT5). The experimental results highlight the significant role of the OCR-enhanced context, with F1-score improvements of up to 209% when the OCR text is appended to questions. Additionally, we propose a multi-agent VQA framework combining per