File size: 32,997 Bytes
6ba6082
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
564134f
6ba6082
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
564134f
 
6ba6082
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
564134f
6ba6082
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html data-theme="light">

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  <meta name="description" content="Building an Open Polish Vision-Language Model." />
  <meta name="keywords" content="VLM, Polish, AI, Multimodal, LLM, PLLuM, LLaVA-PLLuM" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
  <title>LLaVA-PLLuM: a Polish Vision-Language Model</title>
  <link rel="icon"
    href="data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 36 36'><text x='0' y='32' font-size='32'>🇵🇱</text></svg>" />

  <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Google+Sans|Noto+Sans|Castoro" rel="stylesheet" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bulma@1.0.4/css/bulma.min.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bulma-carousel@4.0.3/dist/css/bulma-carousel.min.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bulma-slider@2.0.4/dist/css/bulma-slider.min.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/5.15.3/css/all.min.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/jpswalsh/academicons@1/css/academicons.min.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="./static/css/index.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="./static/css/custom.css" />
  <link rel="icon" href="./static/images/favicon.svg" />

  <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
  <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bulma-carousel@4.0.3/dist/js/bulma-carousel.min.js"></script>
  <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bulma-slider@2.0.4/dist/js/bulma-slider.min.js"></script>
  <script src="https://unpkg.com/lucide@latest"></script>
  <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/chart.js"></script>
  <script src="./static/js/index.js"></script>
</head>

<body>
  <section class="hero">
    <div class="hero-body">
      <div class="container is-max-desktop">
        <div class="columns is-centered">
          <div class="column has-text-centered">
            <h1 class="title is-1 publication-title">🇵🇱 LLaVA-PLLuM: Building an Open Polish
              Vision-Language Model</h1>
            <h2 class="subtitle is-4 publication-subtitle mt-4">
              Bridging the gap in multilingual AI with culturally-aware image understanding
            </h2>
            <div class="is-size-5 publication-authors">
              <div class="publication-authors">
                <strong>Grzegorz Statkiewicz, Alicja Dobrzeniecka, Aleksandra Krasnodębska, Sebastian Cygert, Wojciech
                  Kusa</strong>
              </div>
              <div class="author-institute">
                <span class="author-block">NASK National Research Institute</span>
              </div>
              <span class="author-block" style="margin-left: 15px">
                <a href="mailto:firstname.lastname@nask.pl">firstname.lastname@nask.pl</a>
              </span>
            </div>

            <div class="column has-text-centered">
              <div class="publication-links">
                <!-- PDF Link. -->
                <span class="link-block">
                  <a class="external-link button is-normal is-rounded is-dark" disabled>
                    <span class="icon">
                      <i class="ai ai-arxiv"></i>
                    </span>
                    <span>arXiv (soon)</span>
                  </a>
                </span>
                <!-- Code Link. -->
                <span class="link-block">
                  <a href="https://huggingface.co/NASK-PIB/LLaVA-PLLuM-12B-nc-instruct"
                    target="_blank"
                    class="external-link button is-normal is-rounded is-dark">
                    <span class="icon">
                      <i data-lucide="download"></i>
                    </span>
                    <span>Model</span>
                  </a>
                </span>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </section>

  <section class="section">
    <div class="container is-max-desktop">
      <div class="columns">
        <!-- Table of Contents -->
        <div class="column is-3 is-hidden-touch">
          <aside class="menu sticky-menu">
            <p class="menu-label">Contents</p>
            <ul class="menu-list">
              <li><a href="#introduction">Introduction</a></li>
              <li><a href="#methodology">Methodology</a></li>
              <li><a href="#evaluation">Evaluation & Results</a></li>
              <li><a href="#qualitative">Qualitative Results</a></li>
              <li><a href="#summary">Summary</a></li>
              <li><a href="#references">References</a></li>
              <li><a href="#bibtex">BibTeX</a></li>
            </ul>
          </aside>
        </div>

        <!-- Main Content -->
        <div class="column is-9">
          <!-- Introduction. -->
          <div class="columns is-centered" id="introduction">
            <div class="column is-full-width">
              <h2 class="title is-3">Introduction</h2>
              <div class="content has-text-justified">
                <p>
                  Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in
                  combining text and visual understanding. However, most state-of-the-art solutions are trained
                  primarily on English data, which limits their applicability in other languages and cultural
                  contexts. Our goal is to bridge this gap by creating a Polish multimodal model that not only
                  understands text and images but also reflects Polish linguistic and cultural nuances.
                </p>
                <p>
                  In this blog post, we describe the methodology used to deliver a proof-of-concept for a Polish Large
                  Language Model capable of handling both text and visual data. Our approach builds on the LLaVA-NeXT
                  framework <a href="#ref-3">[3]</a>, which aligns a pretrained visual encoder with a large language
                  model (LLM) via a lightweight MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptron) projector. We use the following
                  components:
                </p>
                <ul>
                  <li>
                    <strong>Language Model:</strong> PLLuM-12B (Polish Large Language Model)
                    <a href="#ref-1">[1]</a> - a Polish-native, instruction-tuned LLM.
                  </li>
                  <li>
                    <strong>Vision Encoder:</strong> SigLIP2 So400m/14, 384px <a href="#ref-4">[4]</a> - chosen for
                    strong multilingual image-text alignment and improved localization.
                  </li>
                </ul>
                <p>
                  We trained our models using automatic translation combined with manual filtering, resulting in
                  approximately 550 thousand samples for pretraining and 2 million samples for instruction fine-tuning.
                  The models
                  accurately describe images, incorporate Polish cultural context, and handle basic visual tasks such as
                  OCR and object counting.
                </p>
                <p>
                  Evaluation on open-source benchmarks and qualitative analysis show notable improvements in Polish
                  language understanding as well as recognizing some of Polish cultural elements, while maintaining
                  general image understanding and reasoning capabilities compared to existing open-source models.
                </p>
                <p>
                  This proof-of-concept marks an initial step toward robust multimodal models for Polish. To accelerate
                  progress and foster collaboration, we are releasing our model weights on Hugging Face.
                </p>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <!--/ Introduction. -->

          <hr class="section-divider" />

          <!-- Methodology -->
          <div class="columns is-centered" id="methodology">
            <div class="column is-full-width">
              <h2 class="title is-3">Methodology</h2>

              <h3 class="title is-4">Model Architecture</h3>
              <div class="content has-text-justified">
                <p>
                  We build on the LLaVA-NeXT architecture <a href="#ref-3">[3]</a> which aligns a pretrained visual
                  encoder with a large language model (LLM) via a lightweight two-layer MLP projector. This design
                  preserves the LLM’s strong language prior while enabling efficient multimodal grounding. Compared to
                  the original LLaVA, LLaVA-NeXT supports higher input resolutions and dynamic tiling, features that
                  have been observed to improve fine-grained perception and OCR performance.
                </p>
                <p>
                  As the language backbone, we use <strong>PLLuM-12B-nc-instruct-250715</strong>
                  <a href="#ref-1">[1]</a>, a Polish-native, instruction-tuned LLM. For the vision tower, we replace
                  the CLIP-like encoder commonly used in LLaVA variants with
                  <strong>SigLIP2 So400m/14, 384px</strong> <a href="#ref-4">[4]</a>, selected for its strong
                  multilingual image-text alignment.
                </p>
              </div>

              <h3 class="title is-4">Training Procedure</h3>
              <div class="content has-text-justified">
                <p>We train the model in two stages following the LLaVA-NeXT procedure:</p>
                <ul>
                  <li>
                    <strong>Stage 1 (Pre-training):</strong> Freeze the LLM backbone and vision encoder, optimize only
                    the MLP projector on pretraining dataset to align the connector.
                  </li>
                  <li>
                    <strong>Stage 2 (Instruction Tuning):</strong> Joint training of vision tower and projector,
                    with LLM adaptation using LoRA on instruction dataset.
                  </li>
                </ul>
                <div class="table-container">
                  <table class="table is-bordered is-striped is-hoverable is-fullwidth">
                    <thead>
                      <tr>
                        <th>Parameter</th>
                        <th>Stage 1</th>
                        <th>Stage 2</th>
                      </tr>
                    </thead>
                    <tbody>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>Training Samples</strong></td>
                        <td>558K</td>
                        <td>2M</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>Vision Encoder (Trainable)</strong></td>
                        <td>N/A</td>
                        <td>400M</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>Projector (Trainable)</strong></td>
                        <td>30M</td>
                        <td>30M</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>Language Model (Trainable)</strong></td>
                        <td>N/A</td>
                        <td>12B</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>Context Size (Tokens)</strong></td>
                        <td>8,192</td>
                        <td>8,192</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>Batch Size</strong></td>
                        <td>256</td>
                        <td>128</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>Learning Rate (Vision Encoder)</strong></td>
                        <td>N/A</td>
                        <td>2x10⁻⁶</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>Learning Rate (Projector)</strong></td>
                        <td>1x10⁻³</td>
                        <td>2x10⁻⁵</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>Learning Rate (Language Model)</strong></td>
                        <td>N/A</td>
                        <td>2x10⁻⁵</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>LoRA Rank (Language Model)</strong></td>
                        <td>N/A</td>
                        <td>128</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>LoRA Alpha (Language Model)</strong></td>
                        <td>N/A</td>
                        <td>256</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>LoRA Dropout (Language Model)</strong></td>
                        <td>N/A</td>
                        <td>0.05</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td><strong>Epochs</strong></td>
                        <td>1</td>
                        <td>1</td>
                      </tr>
                    </tbody>
                  </table>
                </div>
              </div>

              <h3 class="title is-4">Training Data</h3>
              <div class="content has-text-justified">
                <p>As the pretraining dataset, we use the LLaVA-LCS-558K <a href="#ref-16">[16]</a> following the LLaVA
                  paper <a href="#ref-19">[19]</a>. This dataset is a subset of the LAION/CC/SBU collection, filtered
                  for balanced concept coverage. It consists of 558k image-caption pairs augmented with BLIP synthetic
                  captions, which we translate to Polish to align the visual features with our language model.</p>
                <p>Our instruction dataset spans four skill categories:</p>
                <ul>
                  <li><strong>General:</strong> We translate English datasets: ALLaVA <a href="#ref-5">[5]</a>,
                    LLaVA-Instruct <a href="#ref-6">[6]</a>, Q-Instruct <a href="#ref-7">[7]</a>, LVIS-Instruct4V <a
                      href="#ref-8">[8]</a>, and A-OKVQA <a href="#ref-9">[9]</a>.</li>
                  <li>
                    <strong>OCR:</strong> Synthetic document-style images. We generate a Polish version (SynthDoG-PL)
                    and use the English version (SynthDoG-EN) following the SynthDoG procedure <a
                      href="#ref-10">[10]</a>.
                  </li>
                  <li>
                    <strong>Knowledge:</strong> Based on the WIT dataset <a href="#ref-12">[12]</a>. We select samples
                    with human-written Polish and English captions.
                  </li>
                  <li><strong>Counting:</strong> We translate TallyQA <a href="#ref-13">[13]</a></li>
                </ul>
                <p>
                  For translation, we use the Tower+ 72B model <a href="#ref-14">[14]</a> and the COMET reference-free
                  metric <a href="#ref-15">[15]</a> for filtering.
                  The resulting datasets are instantiated mostly in Polish (85%), with a smaller sample in English
                  (15%).
                </p>
                <div class="column is-full">
                  <div class="box is-shadowless">
                    <canvas id="trainingDataChart"></canvas>
                    <p class="has-text-centered mt-5 has-text-grey">Fine-tuning data distribution</p>
                  </div>
                </div>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <!--/ Methodology -->

          <hr class="section-divider" />

          <!-- Evaluation -->
          <div class="columns is-centered" id="evaluation">
            <div class="column is-full-width">
              <h2 class="title is-3">Evaluation & Results</h2>

              We conduct a two-fold evaluation to assess the performance of our Polish vision-language model: (1)
              quantitative benchmarking using MMBench v1.1, and (2) a model-as-a-judge study on image captioning quality
              in Polish.

              <h3 class="title is-4">MMBench v1.1</h3>
              <div class="content has-text-justified">
                <p>
                  Due to the absence of established multimodal evaluation benchmarks in Polish, we adopt existing
                  English benchmarks for quantitative assessment.
                  As a primary benchmark, we selected MMBench v1.1 <a href="#ref-17">[17]</a>, which evaluates multiple
                  dimensions of visual understanding, including object recognition, OCR, commonsense reasoning, and
                  fine-grained perception.
                  Because the official MMBench test split has not been released, we choose to evaluate on the
                  development set.
                </p>
                <p>
                  To enable Polish evaluation, we translated all MMBench v1.1 questions into Polish using Tower+ 72B <a
                    href="#ref-14">[14]</a>, followed by manual expert correction to ensure linguistic accuracy and
                  eliminate translation artifacts. The resulting MMBench-PL dataset is therefore human-validated and
                  suitable for assessing Polish multimodal reasoning.
                </p>
                <p>
                  The usage of development split makes comparisons strictly fair only against the LLaVA family of
                  models, whose training data and fine-tuning procedures are publicly documented. For other open-source
                  VLMs (e.g., Pixtral, Qwen2.5-VL, PaliGemma), the extent of exposure to MMBench during fine-tuning is
                  unknown.
                  Only PaliGemma partially discloses pre-training information, but not fine-tuning, and therefore direct
                  leaderboard-style comparison should be interpreted with caution.
                </p>
                <div class="table-container">
                  <table class="table is-bordered is-striped is-hoverable is-fullwidth">
                    <thead>
                      <tr>
                        <th>Model</th>
                        <th>MMBench (Polish)</th>
                        <th>MMBench (English)</th>
                      </tr>
                    </thead>
                    <tbody>
                      <tr>
                        <td>LLaVA-1.6-Mistral-7B</td>
                        <td>66.41%</td>
                        <td>72.37%</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td>LLaVA-1.6-Vicuna-13B</td>
                        <td>68.29%</td>
                        <td>74.14%</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr class="is-selected">
                        <td><strong>LLaVA-PLLuM-12b-nc (Ours)</strong></td>
                        <td><strong>73.89%</strong> <span class="tag is-success">+5.6%</span></td>
                        <td><strong>73.89%</strong></td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr class="has-background-light">
                        <td colspan="3" class="has-text-centered">
                          <em>Additional Open-Source Models (different architectures)</em>
                        </td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td>PaliGemma2-10B</td>
                        <td>77.63%</td>
                        <td>79.59%</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td>Pixtral-12B</td>
                        <td>79.04%</td>
                        <td>81.52%</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td>Qwen2.5-VL-7B</td>
                        <td>74.38%</td>
                        <td>79.02%</td>
                      </tr>
                    </tbody>
                  </table>
                </div>
                <p>
                  <strong>Key Finding:</strong> Our model achieves <strong>+5.6% improvement</strong> on Polish
                  benchmark compared to LLaVA-1.6-Vicuna-13B while maintaining comparable English performance,
                  demonstrating significantly improved recognition of Polish context.
                </p>
              </div>

              <h3 class="title is-4">Model-as-a-Judge Evaluation</h3>
              <div class="content has-text-justified">
                <p>
                  To evaluate abilities that go beyond multiple-choice recognition and involve open-ended text
                  generation, we conducted a second study based on image captioning. For this purpose, we used the
                  Polish portion of the XM3600 dataset [<a href="#ref-18">18</a>].
                  The task in XM3600 requires models to produce accurate, relevant, and grammatically correct
                  descriptions of images, making it a suitable testbed for generative multimodal performance.
                </p>
                <p>
                  We benchmarked our model against three competitive open-source vision-language models of different
                  architectures: Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, Pixtral-12B, and PaliGemma-3B, complementing the MMBench
                  evaluation.
                </p>
                <p>
                  Because no Polish human-annotated standard for caption quality currently exists, we adopted an
                  LLM-as-a-judge evaluation strategy using LLaVA-OneVision-72B, the strongest open-source VLM at the
                  time of evaluation and capable of jointly processing the image and candidate captions.
                  We used a pairwise comparison setup in which the judge is presented with an image and two captions and
                  determines which description is better.
                  Since prompt wording and input order can influence the outcome, we employed two prompt
                  formulations—one presenting caption A before B and one reversing the order—and tested each with both
                  model assignments (our model as A and as B).
                  The resulting four judgments for each comparison were then averaged to obtain a stable final score.
                </p>
                <p>
                  Together, these steps provide a controlled and replicable protocol for assessing Polish-language
                  caption quality in the absence of human-annotated ground truth, while capturing the generative
                  multimodal capabilities of the evaluated models.
                </p>
                <div class="table-container">
                  <table class="table is-bordered is-striped is-hoverable is-fullwidth">
                    <thead>
                      <tr>
                        <th>Comparison</th>
                        <th>Vision-Language Model Judge Winrate</th>
                      </tr>
                    </thead>
                    <tbody>
                      <tr>
                        <td>LLaVA-PLLuM-12b-nc vs PaliGemma-3B</td>
                        <td><strong>95.2%</strong> vs 4.8%</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td>LLaVA-PLLuM-12b-nc vs Qwen2.5-VL-7B</td>
                        <td><strong>62.7%</strong> vs 37.3%</td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr>
                        <td>LLaVA-PLLuM-12b-nc vs Pixtral-12B</td>
                        <td><strong>59.3%</strong> vs 40.7%</td>
                      </tr>
                    </tbody>
                  </table>
                </div>
                <p>
                  <strong>Key Finding:</strong> Across all comparisons, LLaVA-PLLuM is consistently preferred by the judge,
                  indicating higher caption quality in Polish. Our qualitative analysis showed that LLaVA-PLLuM produces more
                  grammatically correct sentences, maintains proper Polish morphology, and avoids inventing non-existent
                  Polish words—a common failure mode observed in baseline models.
                </p>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <!--/ Evaluation -->

          <hr class="section-divider" />

          <!-- Qualitative Results -->
          <div class="columns is-centered" id="qualitative">
            <div class="column is-full-width">
              <h2 class="title is-3">Qualitative Results</h2>
              <div class="content has-text-justified">
                <p>
                  To examine the models’ ability to grasp and understand Polish cultural context, we collected and
                  annotated a small dataset of pictures.
                </p>

                <div id="qualitative-results-container"></div>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <!--/ Qualitative Results -->

          <hr class="section-divider" />

          <!-- Summary -->
          <div class="columns is-centered" id="summary">
            <div class="column is-full-width">
              <h2 class="title is-3">Summary & Next Steps</h2>
              <div class="content has-text-justified">
                <p>
                  We have presented our pipeline for creating: a Polish vision-language model.
                  Crucially, this system was developed with minimal data curation, relying primarily on synthetic and
                  machine-translated datasets, without human correction or manual
                  annotation. Starting from the open-source LLaVA model family and equipping it with the PLLuM language
                  model, we managed to improve the VLM's ability to understand the Polish language as well as aspects of
                  Polish cultural context. We show gains of 5.6 percentage points over LLaVA-based baselines on a
                  manually corrected Polish-language version of MMBench dataset, underscoring the effectiveness of our data-efficient
                  approach.
                </p>
                <p>
                  This is only the first step toward creating a more capable family of Polish vision-language models.
                  We expect that further scaling of data and leveraging more recent vision-language architectures will
                  lead to additional improvements. We also intend to enhance the evaluation protocols by incorporating
                  human assessments and expanding the benchmark datasets to better capture Polish-specific challenges.
                </p>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <!--/ Summary -->

          <hr class="section-divider" />

          <!-- References -->
          <div class="columns is-centered" id="references">
            <div class="column is-full-width">
              <h2 class="title is-3">References</h2>
              <div class="content">
                <ol>
                  <li id="ref-1">
                    PLLuM: A Family of Polish Large Language Models -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03823">
                      arXiv:2511.03823
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-2">
                    PLLuM Model -
                    <a href="https://huggingface.co/CYFRAGOVPL/pllum-12b-nc-instruct-250715">
                      Hugging Face
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-3">
                    LLaVA-NeXT -
                    <a href="https://llava-vl.github.io/blog/2024-01-30-llava-next/">
                      Blog Post
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-4">
                    SigLIP2 -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14786">
                      arXiv:2502.14786
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-5">
                    ALLaVA -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11684">
                      arXiv:2402.11684
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-6">
                    Visual Instruction Tuning (LLaVA) -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.08485">
                      arXiv:2304.08485
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-7">
                    Q-Instruct -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06783">
                      arXiv:2311.06783
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-8">
                    LVIS-Instruct4V -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07574">
                      arXiv:2311.07574
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-9">
                    A-OKVQA -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.01718">
                      arXiv:2206.01718
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-10">
                    SynthDoG -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15664">
                      arXiv:2111.15664
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-11">
                    MS COCO -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0312">
                      arXiv:1405.0312
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-12">
                    WIT Dataset -
                    <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3404835.3463257">
                      ACM Digital Library
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-13">
                    TallyQA -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.12440">
                      arXiv:1810.12440
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-14">
                    Tower+ Translation Model -
                    <a href="https://huggingface.co/Unbabel/Tower-Plus-72B">
                      Hugging Face
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-15">
                    COMET Metric -
                    <a href="https://unbabel.github.io/COMET/html/index.html">
                      Documentation
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-16">
                    LLaVA-Pretrain Dataset -
                    <a href="https://huggingface.co/datasets/liuhaotian/LLaVA-Pretrain">
                      Hugging Face
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-17">
                    MMBench -
                    <a href="https://huggingface.co/spaces/opencompass/open_vlm_leaderboard">
                      OpenCompass Leaderboard
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-18">
                    Crossmodal-3600: A Massively Multilingual Multimodal Evaluation Dataset -
                    <a href="https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.45/">
                      EMNLP 2022
                    </a>
                  </li>
                  <li id="ref-19">
                    Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning (LLaVA-1.5) -
                    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03744">
                      arXiv:2310.03744
                    </a>

                </ol>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>

          <!-- BibTeX -->
          <div class="columns is-centered" id="bibtex">
            <div class="column is-full-width">
              <h2 class="title is-3">BibTeX</h2>
              <pre><code>
@misc{statkiewicz2025llavapllum,
  title={LLaVA-PLLuM: Building an Open Polish Vision-Language Model},
  author={Statkiewicz, Grzegorz and Dobrzeniecka, Alicja and 
          Krasnodębska, Aleksandra and Cygert, Sebastian and Kusa, Wojciech},
  year={2025},
  note={Blog post}
}
                </code></pre>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </section>

  <footer class="footer">
    <div class="container">
      <div class="content has-text-centered">
        <p>
          This website is adapted from <a href="https://github.com/nerfies/nerfies.github.io" target="_blank">Nerfies</a>, licensed
          under a
          <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
            4.0 International License</a>.
        </p>
      </div>
    </div>
  </footer>

  <button id="scrollToTopBtn" class="button is-rounded is-dark" title="Go to top">
    <span class="icon">
      <i class="fas fa-arrow-up"></i>
    </span>
  </button>
</body>

</html>