SII-Monument-Valley/CiQi-VQA

CiQi-Agent

📖 Paper | 📊 CiQi-VQA Dataset | 🧪 CiQi-Bench Benchmark | 🤗 CiQi-Agent Model

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CiQi-Agent: Aligning Vision, Tools and Aesthetics in Multimodal Agent for Cultural Reasoning on Chinese Porcelains

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Paper Link

🎯 Overview

We present CiQi-Agent, a domain-specific multimodal agent for antique Chinese porcelain connoisseurship. The project is designed to combine fine-grained visual perception, tool-augmented reasoning, and cultural-heritage knowledge grounding for explainable porcelain analysis.

CiQi-Agent is built for tool-augmented multimodal reasoning on antique Chinese porcelains. During inference, it can inspect local visual evidence with an image zoom-in tool, retrieve visually similar examples with image retrieval, and access relevant domain knowledge with text retrieval, enabling more grounded and interpretable connoisseurship analysis.

Alongside the model, we release:

• CiQi-VQA, covering 29,596 porcelain specimens, 51,553 images, and 557,943 VQA pairs
• CiQi-Bench, built from 775 porcelain specimens, 878 images, and 5,425 multiple-choice questions

On CiQi-Bench, CiQi-Agent achieves 81.5% average accuracy on multiple-choice evaluation and 66.7% average score on free-form evaluation, outperforming strong open-source and closed-source multimodal baselines.

🤖 Model

• Built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct
• Uses tool-augmented reasoning with zoom-in, image retrieval, and text retrieval
• Trained with a two-phase supervised fine-tuning + reinforcement learning pipeline
• Evaluated on CiQi-Bench with both multiple-choice and free-form protocols
• Achieves 81.5% average accuracy on multiple-choice evaluation, exceeding GPT-5 by 5.7 points and the strongest listed open-source baseline GLM-4.5V (72.6%) by 8.9 points
• Achieves 66.7% average score on free-form evaluation, exceeding GPT-5 by 18.7 points and Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct by 23.7 points

📊 Model Performance

Multiple-Choice Accuracy (%) on CiQi-Bench

Model	Dynasty	Reign	Kiln	Color	Motif	Shape	Naming	Average
GPT-5	65.7	61.4	79.6	86.5	69.3	83.8	84.3	75.8
GPT-4.1	59.3	68.3	71.1	85.0	62.2	81.8	77.9	72.2
GPT-4o	59.1	60.4	68.6	89.2	70.1	84.2	82.1	73.4
o3	57.6	57.4	72.2	82.6	62.4	76.8	76.6	69.4
Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct	57.6	34.7	69.2	86.7	71.7	84.1	80.3	69.2
GLM-4.5V (106B)	58.3	59.4	75.8	82.3	70.4	81.8	80.6	72.6
InternVL3.5-241B-A28B-Flash	57.1	38.6	59.5	82.1	64.8	73.9	68.5	63.5
Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct (16B)	59.3	22.8	48.8	84.8	59.8	77.9	70.3	60.5
CiQi-Agent (Ours, 7B)	77.6	70.3	81.8	91.4	75.7	88.1	85.2	81.5

Free-Form Score (%) on CiQi-Bench

Model	Dynasty	Reign	Kiln	Color	Motif	Shape	Average
GPT-5	39.4	32.8	42.6	74.4	35.3	63.9	48.0
GPT-4.1	36.7	27.2	29.0	67.5	27.6	60.1	41.3
GPT-4o	26.9	13.4	15.1	53.9	21.1	47.6	29.7
o3	42.7	36.6	44.4	74.2	33.1	62.1	48.8
Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct	29.5	31.2	27.7	75.8	31.0	62.6	43.0
GLM-4.5V (106B)	31.0	14.3	32.8	65.4	31.1	65.2	39.9
InternVL3.5-241B-A28B-Flash	42.4	31.6	36.9	52.6	19.6	41.5	37.4
Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct (16B)	17.3	23.7	16.2	69.5	26.5	61.3	35.7
CiQi-Agent (Ours, 7B)	71.3	49.1	69.8	85.4	49.7	75.0	66.7

📦 Dataset & Benchmark

📊 CiQi-VQA

CiQi-VQA is a large-scale dataset for porcelain-centered multimodal training.

• 29,596 porcelain specimens
• 51,553 images
• 557,943 VQA pairs
• 38 dynasties
• 42 reign periods
• 246 glaze color categories
• 248 decorative motif categories
• 158 vessel shape categories

Link: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SII-Monument-Valley/CiQi-VQA

🧪 CiQi-Bench

CiQi-Bench is an expert-aligned benchmark for evaluating porcelain connoisseurship ability.

• 775 porcelain specimens
• 878 images
• 5,425 multiple-choice questions
• Free-form evaluation with attribute-wise scoring

Link: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SII-Monument-Valley/CiQi-Bench

📈 Dataset and Benchmark Statistics

Split / Resource	Porcelains	Images	VQA Questions	Multiple-Choice Questions	Attributes
CiQi-VQA SFT	28,821	50,675	557,168	---	dynasty, reign, kiln, color, motif, shape
CiQi-VQA RL subset	10,275	10,275	10,275	---	dynasty, reign, kiln, color, motif, shape
CiQi-Bench Evaluation	775	878	775	5,425	dynasty, reign, kiln, color, motif, shape
Total	29,596	51,553	557,943	5,425	dynasty, reign, kiln, color, motif, shape

📜 License

Licensing will be specified separately for the model and the dataset.

• Model license: TBD
• Dataset license: CC BY-NC 4.0

🤝 Acknowledgement

We thank Verl for providing an open-source reinforcement learning framework that supports this line of research.

We also thank DeepEyes for inspiring and informing our exploration of tool-augmented multimodal reasoning.

📜 Citation

@misc{wang2026ciqiagentaligningvisiontools,
      title={CiQi-Agent: Aligning Vision, Tools and Aesthetics in Multimodal Agent for Cultural Reasoning on Chinese Porcelains}, 
      author={Wenhan Wang and Zhixiang Zhou and Zhongtian Ma and Yanzhu Chen and Ziyu Lin and Hao Sheng and Pengfei Liu and Honglin Ma and Wenqi Shao and Qiaosheng Zhang and Yu Qiao},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2603.28474},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28474}, 
}