{"ID":2900964,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T05:51:17.9442275Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T09:30:02.809313052Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31080","arxiv_id":"2605.31080","title":"A Pilot Study on Curator-Guided Multilingual Art Description for Blind and Low-Vision Audiences with Small Vision-Language Models","abstract":"Blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences remain underserved by visual art descriptions, particularly across languages and in museum settings where privacy and intellectual-property constraints may favour small on-premise vision-language models (VLMs). This pilot study investigates curator-guided multilingual art description with Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct for German, Romanian, and Serbian. We construct a parallel BLV-oriented caption corpus from artwork images and metadata, and compare language-specific LoRA adapters with a single multilingual adapter under a fixed backbone and training budget. Evaluation combines automatic lexical and embedding-based metrics with an LLM-as-Judge protocol calibrated against a small Romanian BLV pilot study. Under our pilot setup, language-specific adapters show more stable controllability and visually grounded description quality for Romanian and Serbian, while multilingual adaptation remains competitive in German. We frame these findings as deployment-oriented evidence for small on-premise VLMs, and highlight the need for larger BLV user studies and broader language coverage before drawing general conclusions about multilingual accessibility.","short_abstract":"Blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences remain underserved by visual art descriptions, particularly across languages and in museum settings where privacy and intellectual-property constraints may favour small on-premise vision-language models (VLMs). This pilot study investigates curator-guided multilingual art descriptio...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31080","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.31080v1","authors":"[\"Iosif Tsangko\",\"Andreas Triantafyllopoulos\",\"George Margetis\",\"Ioana Crihana\",\"Björn W. Schuller\"]","published":"2026-05-29T09:47:45Z","proceeding":"cs.MM","tasks":"[\"cs.MM\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.CL\",\"cs.CV\",\"cs.HC\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\",\"LoRA\"]","has_code":false}