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