WikiVQABench: A Knowledge-Grounded Visual Question Answering Benchmark from Wikipedia and Wikidata

Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks have largely emphasized perception-based tasks that can be solved from visual content alone. In contrast, many real-world scenarios require external knowledge that is not directly observable in the image to answer correctly. We introduce WikiVQABench, a human-curated knowledge-grounded VQA benchmark constructed by systematically combining Wikipedia images, their associated article captions, and structured knowledge from Wikidata. Our pipeline uses large language models (LLMs) to generate candidate multiple-choice image-question-answer sets. All generated instances are subsequently reviewed and curated by human annotators to ensure factual correctness, visual-text consistency, and that each question requires external knowledge in addition to visual evidence for correct resolution. WikiVQABench comprises a substantial collection of Wikipedia images with curated multiple-choice questions designed to benchmark knowledge-aware vision-language models (VLMs). Evaluation of fifteen VLMs (256M-90B parameters) reveals a wide performance range (24.7%-75.6% accuracy), demonstrating that the benchmark effectively discriminates model capabilities on knowledge-intensive reasoning. The dataset and benchmarking code are publicly available.

ATLAS: Article Tracking, Linking, and Analysis of Swedish Encyclopedias

The digitization of old encyclopedias represents an important step to improve access to historically structured knowledge. Often, however, this process does not go beyond an optical character recognition, leaving all the underlying structure unexploited. In addition, many encyclopedias had multiple editions reflecting the evolution of knowledge. The lack of structure in the raw text makes it difficult to track changes across these editions. In this work, we built a pipeline to restore the text structure, where we extract the headwords and identify entries; categorize the entities; match entries across editions; and link entries to a Wikidata item. We applied this pipeline to the four major editions of \textit{Nordisk familjebok}, an authoritative Swedish encyclopedia published between 1876 and 1951. We could extract the headwords with an F1 score of 97.8\% and we obtained an F1 score of 93.4\% on the headword classification. On a small-scale evaluation, we reached a 93\% precision on the cross-edition matching, 85\% precision and 16.5\% recall on the Wikidata linking. This shows that an automated approach to digitized historical knowledge is possible. This should facilitate the preservation of general knowledge and the understanding of knowledge transmission. The datasets and programs are available online.