Large Multilingual Models Pivot Zero-Shot Multimodal Learning across Languages
Abstract
Recently there has been a significant surge in multimodal learning in terms of both image-to-text and text-to-image generation. However, the success is typically limited to English, leaving other languages largely behind. Building a competitive counterpart in other languages is highly challenging due to the low-resource nature of non-English multimodal data (i.e., lack of large-scale, high-quality image-text data). In this work, we propose MPM, an effective training paradigm for training large multimodal models in non-English languages. MPM demonstrates that Multilingual language models can Pivot zero-shot Multimodal learning across languages. Specifically, based on a strong multilingual large language model, multimodal models pretrained on English-only image-text data can well generalize to other languages in a (quasi)-zero-shot manner, even surpassing models trained on image-text data in native languages. Taking Chinese as a practice of MPM, we build large multimodal models VisCPM in image-to-text and text-to-image generation, which achieve state-of-the-art (open-source) performance in Chinese. To facilitate future research, we open-source codes and model weights at https://github.com/OpenBMB/VisCPM.git.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2308.12038,
title = {Large Multilingual Models Pivot Zero-Shot Multimodal Learning across Languages},
author = {Jinyi Hu and Yuan Yao and Chongyi Wang and Shan Wang and Yinxu Pan and Qianyu Chen and Tianyu Yu and Hanghao Wu and Yue Zhao and Haoye Zhang and Xu Han and Yankai Lin and Jiao Xue and Dahai Li and Zhiyuan Liu and Maosong Sun},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.12038},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
https://github.com/OpenBMB/VisCPM.git