SEA-CLIP-Tiny is a compact multilingual text‑vision embedding model designed for Southeast Asian languages, containing fewer than 50 million parameters. It adapts a CLIP‑KD framework with region‑specific data curation and multilingual teacher guidance. Across seven languages, it outperforms other student models, achieving R@1 = 12.9%, R@5 = 31.5%, and R@10 = 42.2%, and surpasses MobileCLIP2 by 12.1 points in R@10 while using 38.4% fewer parameters and lower CPU latency.
arXiv:2510.22276v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Contrastive vision-language models have achieved remarkable progress through large-scale pretraining. Recent work has shown that removing Eng...
arXiv:2608.20840v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal retrieval have improved the ability to retrieve information from visually rich documents such as PDFs and reports. Howe...
arXiv:2608. 11002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress in recent years.
arXiv:2606.03027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text embeddings are fundamental to many downstream applications, making robustness important for real-world NLP. However, most recent state-of-the-...
arXiv:2608.21714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent page-image retrievers such as ColPali have improved retrieval over visually rich documents, yet little is known about how they behave in cross-l...
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.
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.
arXiv:2604. 18347v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieved rapid progress in the recent years.
arXiv:2608. 11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrieval and classification across different types of media, spanning text, images,video and audio, has traditionally relied on dual-encoder models that align visual and textual representations through contrastive learning.
arXiv:2606. 13647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types -- nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak.
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...
arXiv:2608. 05785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual text embedding models are commonly adapted using a single training objective across diverse tasks, despite different tasks requiring fundamentally different optimization strategies.