arXiv Computation and Language

Seeing the Unseen: Visual Similarity for Pixel Language Model Adaptation

arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

What Can Low Resource Languages Learn From Each Other?

The paper examines OCR adaptation for low‑resource languages, noting that fine‑tuning often hits a performance ceiling in data‑scarce settings. It identifies that lower layers of language‑specific models learn redundant features while higher layers capture script nuances, leading to a structural inefficiency. To address this, the authors propose PSMC, a framework that pre‑trains a base model, specializes it per language, merges the experts via task arithmetic, and co‑trains a unified multilingual backbone, achieving about a 2% improvement in Word Recognition Rate across 10 Indian scripts without adding parameters.

By Achyuth P, Kahaan Shah, Chetan Arora
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Not Truly Multilingual: Script Consistency as a Missing Dimension in VLM Evaluation

The paper introduces PuMVR, a benchmark of 1,000 Punjabi image‑text pairs spanning three scripts—Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, and Roman—to evaluate Vision‑Language Models (VLMs). Testing ten state‑of‑the‑art VLMs reveals a significant Script Gap: models perform well in one script but poorly in another, with accuracy differences up to 16%. The authors propose the Script Consistency Rate (SCR) as a new metric, noting it can be as low as 24.8% on their benchmark, and argue that current multilingual VLMs are not truly multi‑script.

By Prabhjot Singh, Bhushan Pawar, Madhu Reddiboina, Rajvee Sheth
arXiv AI
Aug 28

VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation

The paper introduces Vision-Free Adaptation (VFA), a method that separates multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment in multimodal large language models. VFA fine‑tunes a base LLM on multilingual text to create a multilingual task vector, which is then merged with the vision‑aligned task vector of an existing MLLM. Experiments on five MLLMs and six multilingual benchmarks show consistent gains while preserving multimodal and text‑only performance, and using less than 2% of text data narrows the performance gap to fully multimodal‑trained models.

By Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

One Form to Transfer Them All: Pretraining Multilingual Language Models Beyond Native Orthography

The study evaluates how different input representations—orthographic text, IPA transcription, and romanization—affect cross‑lingual transfer in autoregressive multilingual language models. Across three model sizes and eight languages grouped into typologically motivated pairs, romanized pretraining consistently outperforms native orthography and IPA, especially as model scale increases. Fine‑tuning a text‑pretrained model on romanized data can harm performance on languages already covered by the base model, suggesting romanization should be integrated at pretraining rather than applied later.

By Muge Zhang, Aaron Jencks, Krishna Badikela, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sachin Kumar
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

VinciCoder: Unifying Multimodal Code Generation via Coarse-to-fine Visual Reinforcement Learning

VinciCoder is a unified framework for multimodal code generation that addresses the limitations of single-task models by training on a large-scale curated corpus of 1.3 M direct generation pairs and 300 k visual‑refinement tasks. It introduces a coarse‑to‑fine Visual Reinforcement Learning (ViRL) approach that uses visual similarity across multi‑scale patches to provide an implementation‑agnostic reward, improving alignment between rendered outputs and input visuals. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show VinciCoder outperforms existing methods, and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of ViRL.

By Xuanle Zhao, Deyang Jiang, Zhixiong Zeng, Lei Chen, Haoyue Yang, Haibo Qiu, Jing Huang, Yufeng Zhong, Liming Zheng, Yilin Cao, Lin Ma