arXiv Computation and Language

Evaluating Perspectival Biases in Cross-Modal Retrieval

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Many Dialects, Many Languages, One Cultural Lens: Evaluating Multilingual VLMs for Bengali Culture Understanding Across Historically Linked Languages and Regional Dialects

BanglaVerse is a new benchmark that evaluates multilingual vision‑language models on Bengali culture, covering nine visual domains and expanding to four languages and five Bangla dialects for a total of about 32,200 artifacts. It includes visual question answering and captioning tasks built from 1,152 manually curated images. Experiments show that models perform worse on dialectal variants and that missing cultural knowledge, rather than visual grounding, is the main bottleneck.

By Nurul Labib Sayeedi, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Mahbub E Sobhani, Rubaya Tabassum, Ariful Ekraj Hridoy, Mehraj Mahmood, Md. Tarek Hasan, Swakkhar Shatabda
arXiv AI
Aug 28

MIMO: Multilingual Information Retrieval via Monolingual Objectives

MIMO: Multilingual Information Retrieval via Monolingual Objectives proposes a two‑stage framework that first aligns a student model to a stable English semantic space using knowledge distillation, then jointly optimizes distillation and cross‑lingual contrastive learning to improve retrieval discrimination while preserving alignment. The approach addresses language clustering and the trade‑off between cross‑lingual alignment and embedding uniformity, outperforming existing cross‑lingual training baselines on both multilingual and multi‑monolingual benchmarks. MIMO also remains competitive with larger off‑the‑shelf models and its alignment‑uniformity analysis clarifies the distinct roles of the two loss components. whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates a practical method to enhance multilingual information retrieval performance by balancing alignment and uniformity, which is crucial for real‑world search environments where queries and documents span multiple languages."

By Youngjoon Jang, Seongtae Hong, Heuiseok Lim
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Multimodal Representation Learning Conditioned on Semantic Relations

Multimodal representation learning has largely relied on contrastive models like CLIP that produce a single embedding per sample, which limits their ability to capture relation-dependent relevance. The proposed Relation-Conditioned Multimodal Learning (RCML) framework explicitly conditions embeddings on natural‑language relation descriptions, enabling the same sample to be represented differently under various relational contexts. RCML builds relation‑aware training pairs, incorporates a relation‑conditioned module, and uses a unified contrastive objective to jointly model cross‑modal alignment and relation‑induced structure, achieving superior performance on retrieval and classification tasks across zero‑shot, fine‑tuned, and out‑of‑domain settings.

By Yang Qiao, Yuntong Hu, Bowen Zhu, Hasibul Haque, Liang Zhao
arXiv AI
Sep 16

RegRet: Enhancing Region-Level Retrieval in Large Multimodal Models

RegRet is a large multimodal model framework that improves region-level retrieval by adding a Region‑Aware Encoder and a multi‑stage training pipeline featuring localized captioning and regional contrastive learning. It also introduces the REGMB benchmark, containing 225k contrastive pairs across four multimodal retrieval tasks. Experiments show RegRet surpasses strong baselines in zero‑shot settings and gains over 20% improvement on REGMB and public benchmarks while maintaining global retrieval performance.

By Xun Liang, Honghui Yang, Weihang Pan, Ruisi Zhao, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Wenxiao Wang, Binbin Lin, Deng Cai
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

PUMA: A Polish Benchmark for Culturally Grounded Multimodal Understanding

arXiv:2608.21853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly moving beyond text processing, adding support for other modalities such as images and audio. While text understa...

By S{\l}awomir Dadas, Micha{\l} Pere{\l}kiewicz, Rafa{\l} Po\'swiata, Ma{\l}gorzata Gr\k{e}bowiec, Bart{\l}omiej Jaworski, Izabela Wo\'zniakowska