arXiv AI

MELLA: Bridging Linguistic Capability and Cultural Groundedness for Low-Resource Language MLLMs

arXiv:2508. 05502v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform strongly in high-resource languages, yet often produce fluent but culturally "thin" descriptions in low-resource settings.

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 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 Computation and Language
Sep 1

Evaluating Perspectival Biases in Cross-Modal Retrieval

arXiv:2510.26861v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal retrieval systems are expected to operate in a semantic space, agnostic to the language or cultural origin of the query. In practi...

By Teerapol Saengsukhiran, Peerawat Chomphooyod, Narabodee Rodjananant, Chompakorn Chaksangchaichot, Patawee Prakrankamanant, Witthawin Sripheanpol, Pak Lovichit, Sarana Nutanong, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 12

Do You See What You Draw? A Semantic Closed-Loop Framework for Holistic Evaluation of Unified Multimodal Models

As Large Vision-Language Models increasingly aim to integrate visual generation and understanding within a single parameter space, evaluating such structural unification in a cohesive manner remains a critical challenge. Current evaluation protocols predominantly treat generative and discriminative capabilities as separate tasks, leaving a gap in system-level evaluation for unified multimodal models (UMMs).