Lost in Translation and Noise: A Deep Dive into the Failure Modes of VLMs on Real-World Tables

Abstract: The impressive performance of VLMs is largely measured on benchmarks that fail to capture the complexities of real-world scenarios. Existing datasets for tabular QA, such as WikiTableQuestions and FinQA, are overwhelmingly monolingual (English) and present tables in a digitally perfect, clean format. This creates a significant gap between research and practice. To address this, we present \textbf{MirageTVQA}, a new benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs on these exact dimensions. Featuring nearly 60,000 QA pairs across 24 languages, MirageTVQA challenges models with tables that are not only multilingual but also visually imperfect, incorporating realistic noise to mimic scanned documents. Our evaluation of the leading VLMs reveals two primary failure points: a severe degradation in performance (over 35\% drop for the best models) when faced with visual noise and a consistent English-first bias where reasoning abilities fail to transfer to other languages. MirageTVQA provides a benchmark for measuring and driving progress towards more robust VLM models for table reasoning. The dataset and the code are available at: https://github.com/anshulsc/MirageTVQA.