Bridging Visual Dynamics and Narrative Reasoning: Multimodal Large Language Models for Short Drama Quality Assessment

Visual Question-Answering (VQA) is a complex multimodal task that requires integrating visual recognition and natural language understanding to answer questions about images. While significant progress has been made in English, resources and models for non-English languages, such as Italian, remain scarce. This paper addresses this gap by evaluating MiniCPM-V 2.6, a state-of-the-art multimodal Large Language Model, on GQA-it, the first large-scale Italian VQA dataset. The primary goal of this work is to investigate the performance of such models when applied off-the-shelf to this task and, if unsatisfactory, to explore how much they can improve with fine-tuning on Italian data. When applied off-the-shelf, MiniCPM-V 2.6 achieves an accuracy of 33.4%. However, after fine-tuning it on the GQA-it dataset, the performance improves significantly, reaching a state-of-the-art accuracy of 59.4%. These findings highlight the importance of language-specific adaptation in multilingual VQA tasks, especially for under-resourced languages like Italian. The trained model is released to the community on a dedicated Huggingface repository: https://huggingface.co/sag-uniroma2/MiniCPM-V-2_6-gqa-it-finetuned .