Seeing the Unseen: Visual Similarity for Pixel Language Model Adaptation
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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arXiv:2609.01147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-rich visual inputs require models that can read, retrieve, and compress language directly in pixel space, yet existing pixel-text encoders strug...
MIXAR is the first generative multilingual pixel‑based language model, pretrained on eight high‑resource languages across Latin and CJK scripts with up to 0.5 B parameters. It replaces unstable adversarial training with a GRPO‑based reinforcement‑learning stage, improving free‑generation accuracy by up to 2.3× on multilingual benchmarks. MIXAR generalizes better to unseen low‑resource languages than a tokenizer‑based model trained on the same corpus, matches tokenizer models on discriminative tasks, and resists orthographic attacks more gracefully.
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.
arXiv:2608. 11002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress in recent years.
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.
arXiv:2610.19443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Native multimodal pre-training trains a single model from scratch on text and multimodal data, enabling it to understand both language and visual input...