AMALIA-VL: A Native European Portuguese Open-Source Vision and Language Model
Diogo Glória-Silva, João Cardeira, Manuel Letras da Luz, Afonso Simplício, Gonçalo Vinagre, Diogo Tavares, Rafael Ferreira, Inês Calvo, Inês Vieira, David Semedo, João Magalhães
Abstract
Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open-source multimodal models, which either conflate it with Brazilian Portuguese or severely under-represent it in their training data mixes. We introduce AMALIA-VL, the first open-source instruction-tuned LVLM built natively for pt-PT, pairing a high-resolution vision encoder with dynamic image tiling and a fully open pt-PT-optimized language model via a learned connector. We contribute with a purposefully designed three-stage training process - vision-language alignment, general visual instruction tuning, and preference optimization - together with a pt-PT-centric multimodal data mix combining curated and translated public datasets with novel datasets that address the near-total absence of European Portuguese multimodal resources. Our evaluation shows that AMALIA-VL establishes a strong baseline for open-source pt-PT LVLMs.We will release model weights, training data, and construction pipelines along with machine-translated pt-PT evaluation benchmarks to help democratize pt-PT LVLM development.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.