VaseVQA: Multimodal Agent and Benchmark for Ancient Greek Pottery
Authors: name: Jinchao Ge; name: Tengfei Cheng; name: Biao Wu; name: Zeyu Zhang; name: Shiya Huang; name: Judith Bishop; name: Gillian Shepherd; name: Meng Fang; name: Ling Chen; name: Yang Zhao
Published: 2025-09-21 18:36:54

Abstract: Analyzing cultural-heritage artifacts remains challenging for MLLMs: general
models lack domain expertise, and SFT often overfits superficial patterns,
yielding brittle reasoning for authentication and historical attribution. This
raises the question of how to equip MLLMs with robust, expert-level reasoning
for ancient Greek pottery. We present VaseVL, an SFT-then-RL system that turns
evaluation into supervision: we construct a taxonomy of question types, probe
the SFT model to localize type-specific performance gaps, and optimize with
type-conditioned, compositionality-oriented rewards targeting those gaps. We
also release VaseVQA, a comprehensive benchmark of 31,773 images designed to
probe deep understanding. Experiments show state-of-the-art results on style
classification and historical attribution with marked gains in compositional
robustness over SFT-only baselines, validating diagnosis-guided,
taxonomy-conditioned reward engineering and providing a reusable resource for
future research. Code and dataset will be available at
https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/VaseVQA.