ViTextVQA: A Large-Scale Visual Question Answering Dataset and a Novel Multimodal Feature Fusion Method for Vietnamese Text Comprehension in Images

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task that requires the joint understanding of natural language and visual content. While early research primarily focused on recognizing objects and scene context, it often overlooked scene text-an essential source of explicit semantic information. This paper introduces \textbf{ViTextVQA} (\textbf{Vi}etnamese \textbf{Text}-based \textbf{V}isual \textbf{Q}uestion \textbf{A}nswering), the first large-scale Vietnamese dataset specializing in text-based VQA. The dataset contains \textbf{over 16,000} images and \textbf{over 50,000} question-answer pairs. To tackle this task efficiently, \textbf{ViTextBLIP-2} (Vietnamese Text-based Bootstrapped Language-Image Model via Fine-tuning) is proposed, a novel multimodal feature fusion method designed to optimize Vietnamese text-based VQA. Experiments with state-of-the-art models highlight the importance of token ordering in OCR text for answer generation, leading to significant performance improvements. The ViTextVQA dataset is publicly available for research purposes.