Development Framework for Image-Text Question Answering Models Based on Multimodal AI

This article presents an open-source visual-language model (VLM) baseline framework designed for the 2026 SKKU Multimodal AI Challenge. Its core features include support for local inference, strict compliance with fair competition rules, and a complete experimental toolchain. Maintained by gongpil00 and released on GitHub on June 2, 2026, the project aims to help participants get started quickly and establish a reliable development foundation.

Keywords: Multimodal AI, Visual-Language Model, Image-Text Q&A, VLM, Open-Source Framework, SKKU Challenge, Local Inference, Large Language Model

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) and visual-language models (VLMs), multimodal AI technology has become a cutting-edge focus in the field of artificial intelligence. The Image-Text Q&A task requires models to understand image content and provide accurate answers to natural language questions, which places extremely high demands on the model's cross-modal understanding ability.

The 2026 SKKU Multimodal AI Challenge provides a fair competitive platform for researchers and developers, requiring participants to develop high-performance multimodal question-answering systems under strict rule constraints. This project is an open-source baseline implementation for the challenge, aiming to help participants get started quickly and establish a reliable development foundation.

Local-First Inference Architecture

Unlike many solutions that rely on cloud APIs, this framework adheres to the local inference principle. All weights of visual-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) are directly loaded into the local environment for inference. This not only reduces dependence on external services but also ensures data privacy and controllable inference latency.

Compliance with Fair Competition Rules

The project strictly follows the core rules of the challenge, reflecting respect for the spirit of fair competition:

• Prohibition of remote inference APIs: All computations are completed locally
• Prohibition of deriving prompts from test question patterns: Ensures the model's generalization ability
• Prohibition of reverse-engineering training data: Maintains the fairness of the competition
• Final labels must come from model-generated text: Ensures traceability of results

Open-Source Model Support

The framework is designed to be compatible with open-source VLM and LLM weights, supporting multiple mainstream open-source multimodal model architectures. This design choice not only reduces the cost of participation but also provides a reproducible research foundation for the research community.

Modular Code Structure

The project adopts a clear modular design, including the following core components:

1. Model Loading Module: Responsible for locally loading pre-trained weights
2. Inference Engine: Executes image encoding and text generation
3. Post-Processing Module: Parses model outputs and extracts final answers
4. Experiment Tools: Supports hyperparameter tuning and result recording

Experimental Reproducibility

To ensure the reproducibility of experimental results, the project includes detailed configuration management and logging mechanisms. The complete configuration, random seed, and model version of each experiment are properly saved for subsequent analysis and comparison.

Academic Research Value

For researchers in the field of multimodal AI, this project provides a clean and compliant experimental baseline. Researchers can explore on this basis:

• The impact of different model architectures on question-answering performance
• The role of Prompt Engineering in multimodal tasks
• The application of Few-shot Learning in visual question answering

Engineering Practice Reference

For engineering developers, the project's local inference architecture and modular design provide valuable practical experience:

• How to efficiently deploy multimodal models in resource-constrained environments
• How to design a scalable experimental framework
• How to balance model performance and inference efficiency

Educational Significance

For students and beginners learning multimodal AI, this project is an ideal entry case:

• Clear code structure, easy to understand
• Follows best practices, cultivates good engineering habits
• Complete documentation and annotations, lowers the learning threshold

Challenge 1: Local Resource Constraints

Problem: Large multimodal models usually require a lot of video memory, and local deployment faces resource bottlenecks.

Solution: The framework supports optimization techniques such as model quantization and gradient checkpointing, and allows the use of smaller open-source models as baselines to ensure operation on consumer-grade hardware.

Challenge 2: Cross-Modal Alignment

Problem: Effective fusion of image features and text features is a core difficulty in multimodal tasks.

Solution: The project is based on mature VLM architectures, leveraging the cross-modal representation capabilities already learned by pre-trained models. Participants can perform fine-tuning optimization on this basis.

Challenge 3: Robustness of Answer Parsing

Problem: The free text generated by the model needs to be accurately parsed into the standard answer format.

Solution: The framework includes a dedicated post-processing module that supports multiple answer format parsing strategies and provides error handling mechanisms to improve the system's robustness.

As an open-source project, the framework welcomes community contributions. Potential improvement directions include:

• Supporting more open-source VLM models
• Adding distributed training support
• Optimizing inference speed
• Providing richer data augmentation strategies
• Integrating model interpretability tools

This project provides a solid technical baseline for the 2026 SKKU Multimodal AI Challenge, reflecting the contribution of the open-source community to promoting the development of multimodal AI technology. By adhering to the principles of local inference, fair competition, and reproducibility, the project builds a healthy technical exploration platform for participants and researchers.

With the continuous evolution of multimodal AI technology, similar baseline projects will play an increasingly important role in lowering research thresholds and promoting technical exchanges. For developers who want to enter the field of multimodal AI, this is an excellent open-source resource worth in-depth research and learning.