Daily Papers

General-purpose multilingual vector representations, used in retrieval, regression and classification, are traditionally obtained from bidirectional encoder models. Despite their wide applicability, encoders have been recently overshadowed by advances in generative decoder-only models. However, many innovations driving this progress are not inherently tied to decoders. In this paper, we revisit the development of multilingual encoders through the lens of these advances, and introduce EuroBERT, a family of multilingual encoders covering European and widely spoken global languages. Our models outperform existing alternatives across a diverse range of tasks, spanning multilingual capabilities, mathematics, and coding, and natively supporting sequences of up to 8,192 tokens. We also examine the design decisions behind EuroBERT, offering insights into our dataset composition and training pipeline. We publicly release the EuroBERT models, including intermediate training checkpoints, together with our training framework.

Creating neural text encoders for written Swiss German is challenging due to a dearth of training data combined with dialectal variation. In this paper, we build on several existing multilingual encoders and adapt them to Swiss German using continued pre-training. Evaluation on three diverse downstream tasks shows that simply adding a Swiss German adapter to a modular encoder achieves 97.5% of fully monolithic adaptation performance. We further find that for the task of retrieving Swiss German sentences given Standard German queries, adapting a character-level model is more effective than the other adaptation strategies. We release our code and the models trained for our experiments at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/swiss-german-text-encoders

While pretrained encoders have achieved success in various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, there is a gap between these pretrained encoders and natural language generation (NLG). NLG tasks are often based on the encoder-decoder framework, where the pretrained encoders can only benefit part of it. To reduce this gap, we introduce DeltaLM, a pretrained multilingual encoder-decoder model that regards the decoder as the task layer of off-the-shelf pretrained encoders. Specifically, we augment the pretrained multilingual encoder with a decoder and pre-train it in a self-supervised way. To take advantage of both the large-scale monolingual data and bilingual data, we adopt the span corruption and translation span corruption as the pre-training tasks. Experiments show that DeltaLM outperforms various strong baselines on both natural language generation and translation tasks, including machine translation, abstractive text summarization, data-to-text, and question generation. The code and pretrained models are available at https://aka.ms/deltalm.

We present a systematic study on multilingual and cross-lingual intent detection from spoken data. The study leverages a new resource put forth in this work, termed MInDS-14, a first training and evaluation resource for the intent detection task with spoken data. It covers 14 intents extracted from a commercial system in the e-banking domain, associated with spoken examples in 14 diverse language varieties. Our key results indicate that combining machine translation models with state-of-the-art multilingual sentence encoders (e.g., LaBSE) can yield strong intent detectors in the majority of target languages covered in MInDS-14, and offer comparative analyses across different axes: e.g., zero-shot versus few-shot learning, translation direction, and impact of speech recognition. We see this work as an important step towards more inclusive development and evaluation of multilingual intent detectors from spoken data, in a much wider spectrum of languages compared to prior work.

Despite being pretrained on multilingual corpora, large language models (LLMs) exhibit suboptimal performance on low-resource languages. Recent approaches have leveraged multilingual encoders alongside LLMs by introducing trainable parameters connecting the two models. However, these methods typically focus on the encoder's output, overlooking valuable information from other layers. We propose \aname (\mname), a framework that integrates representations from all encoder layers, coupled with the \attaname mechanism to enable layer-wise interaction between the LLM and the multilingual encoder. Extensive experiments on multilingual reasoning tasks, along with analyses of learned representations, show that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines.

While multilingual language models like XLM-R have advanced multilingualism in NLP, they still perform poorly in extremely low-resource languages. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that modern LLMs such as LLaMA and Qwen support far fewer languages than XLM-R, making text generation models non-existent for many languages in the world. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel framework for adapting multilingual encoders to text generation in extremely low-resource languages. By reusing the weights between the encoder and the decoder, our framework allows the model to leverage the learned semantic space of the encoder, enabling efficient learning and effective generalization in low-resource languages. Applying this framework to four Chinese minority languages, we present XLM-SWCM, and demonstrate its superior performance on various downstream tasks even when compared with much larger models.

Much recent progress in applications of machine learning models to NLP has been driven by benchmarks that evaluate models across a wide variety of tasks. However, these broad-coverage benchmarks have been mostly limited to English, and despite an increasing interest in multilingual models, a benchmark that enables the comprehensive evaluation of such methods on a diverse range of languages and tasks is still missing. To this end, we introduce the Cross-lingual TRansfer Evaluation of Multilingual Encoders XTREME benchmark, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the cross-lingual generalization capabilities of multilingual representations across 40 languages and 9 tasks. We demonstrate that while models tested on English reach human performance on many tasks, there is still a sizable gap in the performance of cross-lingually transferred models, particularly on syntactic and sentence retrieval tasks. There is also a wide spread of results across languages. We release the benchmark to encourage research on cross-lingual learning methods that transfer linguistic knowledge across a diverse and representative set of languages and tasks.

Semantic parsing (SP) allows humans to leverage vast knowledge resources through natural interaction. However, parsers are mostly designed for and evaluated on English resources, such as CFQ (Keysers et al., 2020), the current standard benchmark based on English data generated from grammar rules and oriented towards Freebase, an outdated knowledge base. We propose a method for creating a multilingual, parallel dataset of question-query pairs, grounded in Wikidata. We introduce such a dataset, which we call Multilingual Compositional Wikidata Questions (MCWQ), and use it to analyze the compositional generalization of semantic parsers in Hebrew, Kannada, Chinese and English. While within-language generalization is comparable across languages, experiments on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer demonstrate that cross-lingual compositional generalization fails, even with state-of-the-art pretrained multilingual encoders. Furthermore, our methodology, dataset and results will facilitate future research on SP in more realistic and diverse settings than has been possible with existing resources.

State-of-the-art neural (re)rankers are notoriously data-hungry which -- given the lack of large-scale training data in languages other than English -- makes them rarely used in multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval settings. Current approaches therefore commonly transfer rankers trained on English data to other languages and cross-lingual setups by means of multilingual encoders: they fine-tune all parameters of pretrained massively multilingual Transformers (MMTs, e.g., multilingual BERT) on English relevance judgments, and then deploy them in the target language(s). In this work, we show that two parameter-efficient approaches to cross-lingual transfer, namely Sparse Fine-Tuning Masks (SFTMs) and Adapters, allow for a more lightweight and more effective zero-shot transfer to multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval tasks. We first train language adapters (or SFTMs) via Masked Language Modelling and then train retrieval (i.e., reranking) adapters (SFTMs) on top, while keeping all other parameters fixed. At inference, this modular design allows us to compose the ranker by applying the (re)ranking adapter (or SFTM) trained with source language data together with the language adapter (or SFTM) of a target language. We carry out a large scale evaluation on the CLEF-2003 and HC4 benchmarks and additionally, as another contribution, extend the former with queries in three new languages: Kyrgyz, Uyghur and Turkish. The proposed parameter-efficient methods outperform standard zero-shot transfer with full MMT fine-tuning, while being more modular and reducing training times. The gains are particularly pronounced for low-resource languages, where our approaches also substantially outperform the competitive machine translation-based rankers.

We present systematic efforts in building long-context multilingual text representation model (TRM) and reranker from scratch for text retrieval. We first introduce a text encoder (base size) enhanced with RoPE and unpadding, pre-trained in a native 8192-token context (longer than 512 of previous multilingual encoders). Then we construct a hybrid TRM and a cross-encoder reranker by contrastive learning. Evaluations show that our text encoder outperforms the same-sized previous state-of-the-art XLM-R. Meanwhile, our TRM and reranker match the performance of large-sized state-of-the-art BGE-M3 models and achieve better results on long-context retrieval benchmarks. Further analysis demonstrate that our proposed models exhibit higher efficiency during both training and inference. We believe their efficiency and effectiveness could benefit various researches and industrial applications.

Text-To-Image (TTI) models, such as DALL-E and StableDiffusion, have demonstrated remarkable prompt-based image generation capabilities. Multilingual encoders may have a substantial impact on the cultural agency of these models, as language is a conduit of culture. In this study, we explore the cultural perception embedded in TTI models by characterizing culture across three hierarchical tiers: cultural dimensions, cultural domains, and cultural concepts. Based on this ontology, we derive prompt templates to unlock the cultural knowledge in TTI models, and propose a comprehensive suite of evaluation techniques, including intrinsic evaluations using the CLIP space, extrinsic evaluations with a Visual-Question-Answer (VQA) model and human assessments, to evaluate the cultural content of TTI-generated images. To bolster our research, we introduce the CulText2I dataset, derived from six diverse TTI models and spanning ten languages. Our experiments provide insights regarding Do, What, Which and How research questions about the nature of cultural encoding in TTI models, paving the way for cross-cultural applications of these models.

The disparity in phonology between learner's native (L1) and target (L2) language poses a significant challenge for mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) systems. This challenge is further intensified by lack of annotated L2 data. This paper proposes a novel MDD architecture that exploits multiple `views' of the same input data assisted by auxiliary tasks to learn more distinctive phonetic representation in a low-resource setting. Using the mono- and multilingual encoders, the model learn multiple views of the input, and capture the sound properties across diverse languages and accents. These encoded representations are further enriched by learning articulatory features in a multi-task setup. Our reported results using the L2-ARCTIC data outperformed the SOTA models, with a phoneme error rate reduction of 11.13% and 8.60% and absolute F1 score increase of 5.89%, and 2.49% compared to the single-view mono- and multilingual systems, with a limited L2 dataset.

Word alignment over parallel corpora has a wide variety of applications, including learning translation lexicons, cross-lingual transfer of language processing tools, and automatic evaluation or analysis of translation outputs. The great majority of past work on word alignment has worked by performing unsupervised learning on parallel texts. Recently, however, other work has demonstrated that pre-trained contextualized word embeddings derived from multilingually trained language models (LMs) prove an attractive alternative, achieving competitive results on the word alignment task even in the absence of explicit training on parallel data. In this paper, we examine methods to marry the two approaches: leveraging pre-trained LMs but fine-tuning them on parallel text with objectives designed to improve alignment quality, and proposing methods to effectively extract alignments from these fine-tuned models. We perform experiments on five language pairs and demonstrate that our model can consistently outperform previous state-of-the-art models of all varieties. In addition, we demonstrate that we are able to train multilingual word aligners that can obtain robust performance on different language pairs. Our aligner, AWESOME (Aligning Word Embedding Spaces of Multilingual Encoders), with pre-trained models is available at https://github.com/neulab/awesome-align

Despite the progress we have recorded in scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) models and evaluation data to several under-resourced African languages, it is difficult to measure accurately the progress we have made on these languages because evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics like BLEU that often have worse correlation with human judgments. Embedding-based metrics such as COMET correlate better; however, lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with a simplified MQM guideline for error-span annotation and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET, a COMET evaluation metric for African languages by leveraging DA training data from high-resource languages and African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-Roberta) to create the state-of-the-art evaluation metric for African languages MT with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (+0.406).

Commonsense reasoning is one of the key problems in natural language processing, but the relative scarcity of labeled data holds back the progress for languages other than English. Pretrained cross-lingual models are a source of powerful language-agnostic representations, yet their inherent reasoning capabilities are still actively studied. In this work, we design a simple approach to commonsense reasoning which trains a linear classifier with weights of multi-head attention as features. To evaluate this approach, we create a multilingual Winograd Schema corpus by processing several datasets from prior work within a standardized pipeline and measure cross-lingual generalization ability in terms of out-of-sample performance. The method performs competitively with recent supervised and unsupervised approaches for commonsense reasoning, even when applied to other languages in a zero-shot manner. Also, we demonstrate that most of the performance is given by the same small subset of attention heads for all studied languages, which provides evidence of universal reasoning capabilities in multilingual encoders.

Language models built from various sources are the foundation of today's NLP progress. However, for many low-resource languages, the diversity of domains is often limited -- more biased to a religious domain, which impacts their performance when evaluated on distant and rapidly evolving domains such as social media. Domain adaptive pre-training (DAPT) and task-adaptive pre-training (TAPT) are popular techniques to reduce this bias through continual pre-training for BERT-based models, but they have not been explored for African multilingual encoders. In this paper, we explore DAPT and TAPT continual pertaining approaches for the African languages social media domain. We introduce AfriSocial-a large-scale social media and news domain corpus for continual pre-training on several African languages. Leveraging AfriSocial, we show that DAPT consistently improves performance on three subjective tasks: sentiment analysis, multi-label emotion, and hate speech classification, covering 19 languages from 1% to 30% F1 score. Similarly, leveraging TAPT on one task data improves performance on other related tasks. For example, training with unlabeled sentiment data (source) for a fine-grained emotion classification task (target) improves the baseline results by an F1 score ranging from 0.55% to 15.11%. Combining these two methods (i.e. DAPT + TAPT) further improves the overall performance.

We present DR.DECR (Dense Retrieval with Distillation-Enhanced Cross-Lingual Representation), a new cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) system trained using multi-stage knowledge distillation (KD). The teacher of DR.DECR relies on a highly effective but computationally expensive two-stage inference process consisting of query translation and monolingual IR, while the student, DR.DECR, executes a single CLIR step. We teach DR.DECR powerful multilingual representations as well as CLIR by optimizing two corresponding KD objectives. Learning useful representations of non-English text from an English-only retriever is accomplished through a cross-lingual token alignment algorithm that relies on the representation capabilities of the underlying multilingual encoders. In both in-domain and zero-shot out-of-domain evaluation, DR.DECR demonstrates far superior accuracy over direct fine-tuning with labeled CLIR data. It is also the best single-model retriever on the XOR-TyDi benchmark at the time of this writing.

Previous work mainly focuses on improving cross-lingual transfer for NLU tasks with a multilingual pretrained encoder (MPE), or improving the performance on supervised machine translation with BERT. However, it is under-explored that whether the MPE can help to facilitate the cross-lingual transferability of NMT model. In this paper, we focus on a zero-shot cross-lingual transfer task in NMT. In this task, the NMT model is trained with parallel dataset of only one language pair and an off-the-shelf MPE, then it is directly tested on zero-shot language pairs. We propose SixT, a simple yet effective model for this task. SixT leverages the MPE with a two-stage training schedule and gets further improvement with a position disentangled encoder and a capacity-enhanced decoder. Using this method, SixT significantly outperforms mBART, a pretrained multilingual encoder-decoder model explicitly designed for NMT, with an average improvement of 7.1 BLEU on zero-shot any-to-English test sets across 14 source languages. Furthermore, with much less training computation cost and training data, our model achieves better performance on 15 any-to-English test sets than CRISS and m2m-100, two strong multilingual NMT baselines.

Recent advancements in multilingual speech encoding as well as transcription raise the question of the most effective approach to semantic speech classification. Concretely, can (1) end-to-end (E2E) classifiers obtained by fine-tuning state-of-the-art multilingual speech encoders (MSEs) match or surpass the performance of (2) cascading (CA), where speech is first transcribed into text and classification is delegated to a text-based classifier. To answer this, we first construct SpeechTaxi, an 80-hour multilingual dataset for semantic speech classification of Bible verses, covering 28 diverse languages. We then leverage SpeechTaxi to conduct a wide range of experiments comparing E2E and CA in monolingual semantic speech classification as well as in cross-lingual transfer. We find that E2E based on MSEs outperforms CA in monolingual setups, i.e., when trained on in-language data. However, MSEs seem to have poor cross-lingual transfer abilities, with E2E substantially lagging CA both in (1) zero-shot transfer to languages unseen in training and (2) multilingual training, i.e., joint training on multiple languages. Finally, we devise a novel CA approach based on transcription to Romanized text as a language-agnostic intermediate representation and show that it represents a robust solution for languages without native ASR support. Our SpeechTaxi dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/ datasets/LennartKeller/SpeechTaxi/.

In this work, we explore a cost-effective framework for multilingual image generation. We find that, unlike models tuned on high-quality images with multilingual annotations, leveraging text encoders pre-trained on widely available, noisy Internet image-text pairs significantly enhances data efficiency in text-to-image (T2I) generation across multiple languages. Based on this insight, we introduce MuLan, Multi-Language adapter, a lightweight language adapter with fewer than 20M parameters, trained alongside a frozen text encoder and image diffusion model. Compared to previous multilingual T2I models, this framework offers: (1) Cost efficiency. Using readily accessible English data and off-the-shelf multilingual text encoders minimizes the training cost; (2) High performance. Achieving comparable generation capabilities in over 110 languages with CLIP similarity scores nearly matching those in English (38.61 for English vs. 37.61 for other languages); and (3) Broad applicability. Seamlessly integrating with compatible community tools like LoRA, LCM, ControlNet, and IP-Adapter, expanding its potential use cases.

Massively multilingual pretrained transformers (MMTs) have tremendously pushed the state of the art on multilingual NLP and cross-lingual transfer of NLP models in particular. While a large body of work leveraged MMTs to mine parallel data and induce bilingual document embeddings, much less effort has been devoted to training general-purpose (massively) multilingual document encoder that can be used for both supervised and unsupervised document-level tasks. In this work, we pretrain a massively multilingual document encoder as a hierarchical transformer model (HMDE) in which a shallow document transformer contextualizes sentence representations produced by a state-of-the-art pretrained multilingual sentence encoder. We leverage Wikipedia as a readily available source of comparable documents for creating training data, and train HMDE by means of a cross-lingual contrastive objective, further exploiting the category hierarchy of Wikipedia for creation of difficult negatives. We evaluate the effectiveness of HMDE in two arguably most common and prominent cross-lingual document-level tasks: (1) cross-lingual transfer for topical document classification and (2) cross-lingual document retrieval. HMDE is significantly more effective than (i) aggregations of segment-based representations and (ii) multilingual Longformer. Crucially, owing to its massively multilingual lower transformer, HMDE successfully generalizes to languages unseen in document-level pretraining. We publicly release our code and models at https://github.com/ogaloglu/pre-training-multilingual-document-encoders .

Sentence embeddings are commonly used in text clustering and semantic retrieval tasks. State-of-the-art sentence representation methods are based on artificial neural networks fine-tuned on large collections of manually labeled sentence pairs. Sufficient amount of annotated data is available for high-resource languages such as English or Chinese. In less popular languages, multilingual models have to be used, which offer lower performance. In this publication, we address this problem by proposing a method for training effective language-specific sentence encoders without manually labeled data. Our approach is to automatically construct a dataset of paraphrase pairs from sentence-aligned bilingual text corpora. We then use the collected data to fine-tune a Transformer language model with an additional recurrent pooling layer. Our sentence encoder can be trained in less than a day on a single graphics card, achieving high performance on a diverse set of sentence-level tasks. We evaluate our method on eight linguistic tasks in Polish, comparing it with the best available multilingual sentence encoders.

Multi-stage information retrieval (IR) has become a widely-adopted paradigm in search. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively evaluated as second-stage reranking models for monolingual IR, a systematic large-scale comparison is still lacking for cross-lingual IR (CLIR). Moreover, while prior work shows that LLM-based rerankers improve CLIR performance, their evaluation setup relies on lexical retrieval with machine translation (MT) for the first stage. This is not only prohibitively expensive but also prone to error propagation across stages. Our evaluation on passage-level and document-level CLIR reveals that further gains can be achieved with multilingual bi-encoders as first-stage retrievers and that the benefits of translation diminishes with stronger reranking models. We further show that pairwise rerankers based on instruction-tuned LLMs perform competitively with listwise rerankers. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the interaction between retrievers and rerankers in two-stage CLIR with LLMs. Our findings reveal that, without MT, current state-of-the-art rerankers fall severely short when directly applied in CLIR.

The aim of this article is to investigate the fine-tuning potential of natural language inference (NLI) data to improve information retrieval and ranking. We demonstrate this for both English and Polish languages, using data from one of the largest Polish e-commerce sites and selected open-domain datasets. We employ both monolingual and multilingual sentence encoders fine-tuned by a supervised method utilizing contrastive loss and NLI data. Our results point to the fact that NLI fine-tuning increases the performance of the models in both tasks and both languages, with the potential to improve mono- and multilingual models. Finally, we investigate uniformity and alignment of the embeddings to explain the effect of NLI-based fine-tuning for an out-of-domain use-case.

Prior work on multilingual sentence embedding has demonstrated that the efficient use of natural language inference (NLI) data to build high-performance models can outperform conventional methods. However, the potential benefits from the recent ``exponential'' growth of language models with billions of parameters have not yet been fully explored. In this paper, we introduce Multilingual Sentence T5 (m-ST5), as a larger model of NLI-based multilingual sentence embedding, by extending Sentence T5, an existing monolingual model. By employing the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) technique, we have achieved a successful scaling of the model's size to 5.7 billion parameters. We conducted experiments to evaluate the performance of sentence embedding and verified that the method outperforms the NLI-based prior approach. Furthermore, we also have confirmed a positive correlation between the size of the model and its performance. It was particularly noteworthy that languages with fewer resources or those with less linguistic similarity to English benefited more from the parameter increase. Our model is available at https://huggingface.co/pkshatech/m-ST5.

We introduce SigLIP 2, a family of new multilingual vision-language encoders that build on the success of the original SigLIP. In this second iteration, we extend the original image-text training objective with several prior, independently developed techniques into a unified recipe -- this includes captioning-based pretraining, self-supervised losses (self-distillation, masked prediction) and online data curation. With these changes, SigLIP 2 models outperform their SigLIP counterparts at all model scales in core capabilities, including zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and transfer performance when extracting visual representations for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Furthermore, the new training recipe leads to significant improvements on localization and dense prediction tasks. We also train variants which support multiple resolutions and preserve the input's native aspect ratio. Finally, we train on a more diverse data-mixture that includes de-biasing techniques, leading to much better multilingual understanding and improved fairness. To allow users to trade off inference cost with performance, we release model checkpoints at four sizes: ViT-B (86M), L (303M), So400m (400M), and g (1B).

Multilingual machine translation enables a single model to translate between different languages. Most existing multilingual machine translation systems adopt a randomly initialized Transformer backbone. In this work, inspired by the recent success of language model pre-training, we present XLM-T, which initializes the model with an off-the-shelf pretrained cross-lingual Transformer encoder and fine-tunes it with multilingual parallel data. This simple method achieves significant improvements on a WMT dataset with 10 language pairs and the OPUS-100 corpus with 94 pairs. Surprisingly, the method is also effective even upon the strong baseline with back-translation. Moreover, extensive analysis of XLM-T on unsupervised syntactic parsing, word alignment, and multilingual classification explains its effectiveness for machine translation. The code will be at https://aka.ms/xlm-t.

Large-scale self-supervised pre-trained speech encoders outperform conventional approaches in speech recognition and translation tasks. Due to the high cost of developing these large models, building new encoders for new tasks and deploying them to on-device applications are infeasible. Prior studies propose model compression methods to address this issue, but those works focus on smaller models and less realistic tasks. Thus, we propose Contrastive Layer-to-layer Distillation (CoLLD), a novel knowledge distillation method to compress pre-trained speech encoders by leveraging masked prediction and contrastive learning to train student models to copy the behavior of a large teacher model. CoLLD outperforms prior methods and closes the gap between small and large models on multilingual speech-to-text translation and recognition benchmarks.

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) like GPT-4V has marked a significant step towards artificial general intelligence. Existing methods mainly focus on aligning vision encoders with LLMs through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to endow LLMs with multimodal abilities, making MLLMs' inherent ability to react to multiple languages progressively deteriorate as the training process evolves. We empirically find that the imbalanced SFT datasets, primarily composed of English-centric image-text pairs, lead to significantly reduced performance in non-English languages. This is due to the failure of aligning the vision encoder and LLM with multilingual tokens during the SFT process. In this paper, we introduce Parrot, a novel method that utilizes textual guidance to drive visual token alignment at the language level. Parrot makes the visual tokens condition on diverse language inputs and uses Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to promote the alignment of multilingual tokens. Specifically, to enhance non-English visual tokens alignment, we compute the cross-attention using the initial visual features and textual embeddings, the result of which is then fed into the MoE router to select the most relevant experts. The selected experts subsequently convert the initial visual tokens into language-specific visual tokens. Moreover, considering the current lack of benchmarks for evaluating multilingual capabilities within the field, we collect and make available a Massive Multilingual Multimodal Benchmark which includes 6 languages, 15 categories, and 12,000 questions, named as MMMB. Our method not only demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on multilingual MMBench and MMMB, but also excels across a broad range of multimodal tasks. Both the source code and the training dataset of Parrot will be made publicly available.

Despite rapid progress, ASR evaluation remains saturated with short-form English, and efficiency is rarely reported. We present the Open ASR Leaderboard, a fully reproducible benchmark and interactive leaderboard comparing 60+ open-source and proprietary systems across 11 datasets, including dedicated multilingual and long-form tracks. We standardize text normalization and report both word error rate (WER) and inverse real-time factor (RTFx), enabling fair accuracy-efficiency comparisons. For English transcription, Conformer encoders paired with LLM decoders achieve the best average WER but are slower, while CTC and TDT decoders deliver much better RTFx, making them attractive for long-form and offline use. Whisper-derived encoders fine-tuned for English improve accuracy but often trade off multilingual coverage. All code and dataset loaders are open-sourced to support transparent, extensible evaluation.

The world of language models is going through turbulent times, better and ever larger models are coming out at an unprecedented speed. However, we argue that, especially for the scientific community, encoder models of up to 1 billion parameters are still very much needed, their primary usage being in enriching large collections of data with metadata necessary for downstream research. We investigate the best way to ensure the existence of such encoder models on the set of very closely related languages - Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, by setting up a diverse benchmark for these languages, and comparing the trained-from-scratch models with the new models constructed via additional pretraining of existing multilingual models. We show that comparable performance to dedicated from-scratch models can be obtained by additionally pretraining available multilingual models even with a limited amount of computation. We also show that neighboring languages, in our case Slovenian, can be included in the additional pretraining with little to no loss in the performance of the final model.

Today, the exponential rise of large models developed by academic and industrial institutions with the help of massive computing resources raises the question of whether someone without access to such resources can make a valuable scientific contribution. To explore this, we tried to solve the challenging task of multilingual image retrieval having a limited budget of $1,000. As a result, we present NLLB-CLIP - CLIP model with a text encoder from the NLLB model. To train the model, we used an automatically created dataset of 106,246 good-quality images with captions in 201 languages derived from the LAION COCO dataset. We trained multiple models using image and text encoders of various sizes and kept different parts of the model frozen during the training. We thoroughly analyzed the trained models using existing evaluation datasets and newly created XTD200 and Flickr30k-200 datasets. We show that NLLB-CLIP is comparable in quality to state-of-the-art models and significantly outperforms them on low-resource languages.

While pretrained language models (PLMs) primarily serve as general-purpose text encoders that can be fine-tuned for a wide variety of downstream tasks, recent work has shown that they can also be rewired to produce high-quality word representations (i.e., static word embeddings) and yield good performance in type-level lexical tasks. While existing work primarily focused on the lexical specialization of monolingual PLMs with immense quantities of monolingual constraints, in this work we expose massively multilingual transformers (MMTs, e.g., mBERT or XLM-R) to multilingual lexical knowledge at scale, leveraging BabelNet as the readily available rich source of multilingual and cross-lingual type-level lexical knowledge. Concretely, we use BabelNet's multilingual synsets to create synonym pairs (or synonym-gloss pairs) across 50 languages and then subject the MMTs (mBERT and XLM-R) to a lexical specialization procedure guided by a contrastive objective. We show that such massively multilingual lexical specialization brings substantial gains in two standard cross-lingual lexical tasks, bilingual lexicon induction and cross-lingual word similarity, as well as in cross-lingual sentence retrieval. Crucially, we observe gains for languages unseen in specialization, indicating that multilingual lexical specialization enables generalization to languages with no lexical constraints. In a series of subsequent controlled experiments, we show that the number of specialization constraints plays a much greater role than the set of languages from which they originate.

This paper investigates the application of voice activity projection (VAP), a predictive turn-taking model for spoken dialogue, on multilingual data, encompassing English, Mandarin, and Japanese. The VAP model continuously predicts the upcoming voice activities of participants in dyadic dialogue, leveraging a cross-attention Transformer to capture the dynamic interplay between participants. The results show that a monolingual VAP model trained on one language does not make good predictions when applied to other languages. However, a multilingual model, trained on all three languages, demonstrates predictive performance on par with monolingual models across all languages. Further analyses show that the multilingual model has learned to discern the language of the input signal. We also analyze the sensitivity to pitch, a prosodic cue that is thought to be important for turn-taking. Finally, we compare two different audio encoders, contrastive predictive coding (CPC) pre-trained on English, with a recent model based on multilingual wav2vec 2.0 (MMS).

Vision-and-language (VL) models with separate encoders for each modality (e.g., CLIP) have become the go-to models for zero-shot image classification and image-text retrieval. The bulk of the evaluation of these models is, however, performed with English text only: the costly creation of language-specific image-caption datasets has limited multilingual VL benchmarks to a handful of high-resource languages. In this work, we introduce Babel-ImageNet, a massively multilingual benchmark that offers (partial) translations of 1000 ImageNet labels to 92 languages, built without resorting to machine translation (MT) or requiring manual annotation. We instead automatically obtain reliable translations of ImageNext concepts by linking them -- via shared WordNet synsets -- to BabelNet, a massively multilingual lexico-semantic network. We evaluate 8 different publicly available multilingual CLIP models on zero-shot image classification (ZS-IC) for each of the 92 Babel-ImageNet languages, demonstrating a significant gap between English ImageNet performance and that of high-resource languages (e.g., German or Chinese), and an even bigger gap for low-resource languages (e.g., Sinhala or Lao). Crucially, we show that the models' ZS-IC performance on Babel-ImageNet highly correlates with their performance in image-text retrieval, validating that Babel-ImageNet is suitable for estimating the quality of the multilingual VL representation spaces for the vast majority of languages that lack gold image-text data. Finally, we show that the performance of multilingual CLIP for low-resource languages can be drastically improved via cheap, parameter-efficient language-specific training. We make our code and data publicly available: https://github.com/gregor-ge/Babel-ImageNet

Modular vision-language models (Vision-LLMs) align pretrained image encoders with (pretrained) large language models (LLMs), representing a computationally much more efficient alternative to end-to-end training of large vision-language models from scratch, which is prohibitively expensive for most. Vision-LLMs instead post-hoc condition LLMs to `understand' the output of an image encoder. With the abundance of readily available high-quality English image-text data as well as monolingual English LLMs, the research focus has been on English-only Vision-LLMs. Multilingual vision-language models are still predominantly obtained via expensive end-to-end pretraining, resulting in comparatively smaller models, trained on limited multilingual image data supplemented with text-only multilingual corpora. In this work, we present mBLIP, the first multilingual Vision-LLM, which we obtain in a computationally efficient manner -- on consumer hardware using only a few million training examples -- by leveraging a pretrained multilingual LLM. To this end, we re-align an image encoder previously tuned to an English LLM to a new, multilingual LLM -- for this, we leverage multilingual data from a mix of vision-and-language tasks, which we obtain by machine-translating high-quality English data to 95 languages. On the IGLUE benchmark, mBLIP yields results competitive with state-of-the-art models. Moreover, in image captioning on XM3600, mBLIP (zero-shot) even outperforms PaLI-X (a model with 55B parameters). Compared to these very large multilingual vision-language models trained from scratch, we obtain mBLIP by training orders of magnitude fewer parameters on magnitudes less data. We release our model and code at https://github.com/gregor-ge/mBLIP.

Diffusion-based scene text synthesis has progressed rapidly, yet existing methods commonly rely on additional visual conditioning modules and require large-scale annotated data to support multilingual generation. In this work, we revisit the necessity of complex auxiliary modules and further explore an approach that simultaneously ensures glyph accuracy and achieves high-fidelity scene integration, by leveraging diffusion models' inherent capabilities for contextual reasoning. To this end, we introduce TextFlux, a DiT-based framework that enables multilingual scene text synthesis. The advantages of TextFlux can be summarized as follows: (1) OCR-free model architecture. TextFlux eliminates the need for OCR encoders (additional visual conditioning modules) that are specifically used to extract visual text-related features. (2) Strong multilingual scalability. TextFlux is effective in low-resource multilingual settings, and achieves strong performance in newly added languages with fewer than 1,000 samples. (3) Streamlined training setup. TextFlux is trained with only 1% of the training data required by competing methods. (4) Controllable multi-line text generation. TextFlux offers flexible multi-line synthesis with precise line-level control, outperforming methods restricted to single-line or rigid layouts. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate that TextFlux outperforms previous methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Speech encoders pretrained through self-supervised learning (SSL) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various downstream tasks, including Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). For instance, fine-tuning SSL models for such tasks has shown significant potential, leading to improvements in the SOTA performance across challenging datasets. In contrast to existing research, this paper contributes by comparing the effectiveness of SSL approaches in the context of (i) the low-resource spoken Tunisian Arabic dialect and (ii) its combination with a low-resource SLU and ASR scenario, where only a few semantic annotations are available for fine-tuning. We conduct experiments using many SSL speech encoders on the TARIC-SLU dataset. We use speech encoders that were pre-trained on either monolingual or multilingual speech data. Some of them have also been refined without in-domain nor Tunisian data through multimodal supervised teacher-student paradigm. This study yields numerous significant findings that we are discussing in this paper.

Research on language technology for the development of medical applications is currently a hot topic in Natural Language Understanding and Generation. Thus, a number of large language models (LLMs) have recently been adapted to the medical domain, so that they can be used as a tool for mediating in human-AI interaction. While these LLMs display competitive performance on automated medical texts benchmarks, they have been pre-trained and evaluated with a focus on a single language (English mostly). This is particularly true of text-to-text models, which typically require large amounts of domain-specific pre-training data, often not easily accessible for many languages. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by compiling, to the best of our knowledge, the largest multilingual corpus for the medical domain in four languages, namely English, French, Italian and Spanish. This new corpus has been used to train Medical mT5, the first open-source text-to-text multilingual model for the medical domain. Additionally, we present two new evaluation benchmarks for all four languages with the aim of facilitating multilingual research in this domain. A comprehensive evaluation shows that Medical mT5 outperforms both encoders and similarly sized text-to-text models for the Spanish, French, and Italian benchmarks, while being competitive with current state-of-the-art LLMs in English.

Memes, combining text and images, frequently use metaphors to convey persuasive messages, shaping public opinion. Motivated by this, our team engaged in SemEval-2024 Task 4, a hierarchical multi-label classification task designed to identify rhetorical and psychological persuasion techniques embedded within memes. To tackle this problem, we introduced a caption generation step to assess the modality gap and the impact of additional semantic information from images, which improved our result. Our best model utilizes GPT-4 generated captions alongside meme text to fine-tune RoBERTa as the text encoder and CLIP as the image encoder. It outperforms the baseline by a large margin in all 12 subtasks. In particular, it ranked in top-3 across all languages in Subtask 2a, and top-4 in Subtask 2b, demonstrating quantitatively strong performance. The improvement achieved by the introduced intermediate step is likely attributable to the metaphorical essence of images that challenges visual encoders. This highlights the potential for improving abstract visual semantics encoding.

In this paper, we present the first multilingual FAQ dataset publicly available. We collected around 6M FAQ pairs from the web, in 21 different languages. Although this is significantly larger than existing FAQ retrieval datasets, it comes with its own challenges: duplication of content and uneven distribution of topics. We adopt a similar setup as Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) and test various bi-encoders on this dataset. Our experiments reveal that a multilingual model based on XLM-RoBERTa achieves the best results, except for English. Lower resources languages seem to learn from one another as a multilingual model achieves a higher MRR than language-specific ones. Our qualitative analysis reveals the brittleness of the model on simple word changes. We publicly release our dataset, model and training script.

Multi-vector dense models, such as ColBERT, have proven highly effective in information retrieval. ColBERT's late interaction scoring approximates the joint query-document attention seen in cross-encoders while maintaining inference efficiency closer to traditional dense retrieval models, thanks to its bi-encoder architecture and recent optimizations in indexing and search. In this paper, we introduce several improvements to the ColBERT model architecture and training pipeline, leveraging techniques successful in the more established single-vector embedding model paradigm, particularly those suited for heterogeneous multilingual data. Our new model, Jina-ColBERT-v2, demonstrates strong performance across a range of English and multilingual retrieval tasks, while also cutting storage requirements by up to 50% compared to previous models.

While recent multilingual automatic speech recognition models claim to support thousands of languages, ASR for low-resource languages remains highly unreliable due to limited bimodal speech and text training data. Better multilingual spoken language understanding (SLU) can strengthen massively the robustness of multilingual ASR by levering language semantics to compensate for scarce training data, such as disambiguating utterances via context or exploiting semantic similarities across languages. Even more so, SLU is indispensable for inclusive speech technology in roughly half of all living languages that lack a formal writing system. However, the evaluation of multilingual SLU remains limited to shallower tasks such as intent classification or language identification. To address this, we present Fleurs-SLU, a multilingual SLU benchmark that encompasses topical speech classification in 102 languages and multiple-choice question answering through listening comprehension in 92 languages. We extensively evaluate both end-to-end speech classification models and cascaded systems that combine speech-to-text transcription with subsequent classification by large language models on Fleurs-SLU. Our results show that cascaded systems exhibit greater robustness in multilingual SLU tasks, though speech encoders can achieve competitive performance in topical speech classification when appropriately pre-trained. We further find a strong correlation between robust multilingual ASR, effective speech-to-text translation, and strong multilingual SLU, highlighting the mutual benefits between acoustic and semantic speech representations.

We present Speech-MASSIVE, a multilingual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) dataset comprising the speech counterpart for a portion of the MASSIVE textual corpus. Speech-MASSIVE covers 12 languages from different families and inherits from MASSIVE the annotations for the intent prediction and slot-filling tasks. Our extension is prompted by the scarcity of massively multilingual SLU datasets and the growing need for versatile speech datasets to assess foundation models (LLMs, speech encoders) across languages and tasks. We provide a multimodal, multitask, multilingual dataset and report SLU baselines using both cascaded and end-to-end architectures in various training scenarios (zero-shot, few-shot, and full fine-tune). Furthermore, we demonstrate the suitability of Speech-MASSIVE for benchmarking other tasks such as speech transcription, language identification, and speech translation. The dataset, models, and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/hlt-mt/Speech-MASSIVE

Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) often avoid using language embeddings -- learnable vectors assigned to different languages. These embeddings are discarded for two main reasons: (1) mPLMs are expected to have a single, unified parameter set across all languages, and (2) they need to function seamlessly as universal text encoders without requiring language IDs as input. However, this removal increases the burden on token embeddings to encode all language-specific information, which may hinder the model's ability to produce more language-neutral representations. To address this challenge, we propose Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining (LangSAMP), a method that incorporates both language and script embeddings to enhance representation learning while maintaining a simple architecture. Specifically, we integrate these embeddings into the output of the transformer blocks before passing the final representations to the language modeling head for prediction. We apply LangSAMP to the continual pretraining of XLM-R on a highly multilingual corpus covering more than 500 languages. The resulting model consistently outperforms the baseline. Extensive analysis further shows that language/script embeddings encode language/script-specific information, which improves the selection of source languages for crosslingual transfer. We make our code and models publicly available at https://github.com/cisnlp/LangSAMP.

Pretrained bidirectional Transformers, such as BERT, have achieved significant improvements in a wide variety of language understanding tasks, while it is not straightforward to directly apply them for natural language generation. In this paper, we present a sequence-to-sequence fine-tuning toolkit s2s-ft, which adopts pretrained Transformers for conditional generation tasks. Inspired by UniLM, we implement three sequence-to-sequence fine-tuning algorithms, namely, causal fine-tuning, masked fine-tuning, and pseudo-masked fine-tuning. By leveraging the existing pretrained bidirectional Transformers, experimental results show that s2s-ft achieves strong performance on several benchmarks of abstractive summarization, and question generation. Moreover, we demonstrate that the package s2s-ft supports both monolingual and multilingual NLG tasks. The s2s-ft toolkit is available at https://github.com/microsoft/unilm/tree/master/s2s-ft.

This study introduces CLASP (Contrastive Language-Speech Pretraining), a multilingual, multimodal representation tailored for audio-text information retrieval. CLASP leverages the synergy between spoken content and textual data. During training, we utilize our newly introduced speech-text dataset, which encompasses 15 diverse categories ranging from fiction to religion. CLASP's audio component integrates audio spectrograms with a pre-trained self-supervised speech model, while its language encoding counterpart employs a sentence encoder pre-trained on over 100 languages. This unified lightweight model bridges the gap between various modalities and languages, enhancing its effectiveness in handling and retrieving multilingual and multimodal data. Our evaluations across multiple languages demonstrate that CLASP establishes new benchmarks in HITS@1, MRR, and meanR metrics, outperforming traditional ASR-based retrieval approaches in specific scenarios.

Most organizational data in this world are stored as documents, and visual retrieval plays a crucial role in unlocking the collective intelligence from all these documents. However, existing benchmarks focus on English-only document retrieval or only consider multilingual question-answering on a single-page image. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisR-Bench, a multilingual benchmark designed for question-driven multimodal retrieval in long documents. Our benchmark comprises over 35K high-quality QA pairs across 1.2K documents, enabling fine-grained evaluation of multimodal retrieval. VisR-Bench spans sixteen languages with three question types (figures, text, and tables), offering diverse linguistic and question coverage. Unlike prior datasets, we include queries without explicit answers, preventing models from relying on superficial keyword matching. We evaluate various retrieval models, including text-based methods, multimodal encoders, and MLLMs, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. Our results show that while MLLMs significantly outperform text-based and multimodal encoder models, they still struggle with structured tables and low-resource languages, highlighting key challenges in multilingual visual retrieval.

LLMs have become a go-to solution not just for text generation, but also for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Acquiring extensive knowledge through language modeling on web-scale corpora, they excel on English NLU, yet struggle to extend their NLU capabilities to underrepresented languages. In contrast, machine translation models (MT) produce excellent multilingual representations, resulting in strong translation performance even for low-resource languages. MT encoders, however, lack the knowledge necessary for comprehensive NLU that LLMs obtain through language modeling training on immense corpora. In this work, we get the best both worlds by integrating MT encoders directly into LLM backbones via sample-efficient self-distillation. The resulting MT-LLMs preserve the inherent multilingual representational alignment from the MT encoder, allowing lower-resource languages to tap into the rich knowledge embedded in English-centric LLMs. Merging the MT encoder and LLM in a single model, we mitigate the propagation of translation errors and inference overhead of MT decoding inherent to discrete translation-based cross-lingual transfer (e.g., translate-test). Evaluation spanning three prominent NLU tasks and 127 predominantly low-resource languages renders MT-LLMs highly effective in cross-lingual transfer. MT-LLMs substantially and consistently outperform translate-test based on the same MT model, showing that we truly unlock multilingual language understanding for LLMs.

In this paper, we introduce LDGen, a novel method for integrating large language models (LLMs) into existing text-to-image diffusion models while minimizing computational demands. Traditional text encoders, such as CLIP and T5, exhibit limitations in multilingual processing, hindering image generation across diverse languages. We address these challenges by leveraging the advanced capabilities of LLMs. Our approach employs a language representation strategy that applies hierarchical caption optimization and human instruction techniques to derive precise semantic information,. Subsequently, we incorporate a lightweight adapter and a cross-modal refiner to facilitate efficient feature alignment and interaction between LLMs and image features. LDGen reduces training time and enables zero-shot multilingual image generation. Experimental results indicate that our method surpasses baseline models in both prompt adherence and image aesthetic quality, while seamlessly supporting multiple languages. Project page: https://zrealli.github.io/LDGen.

We introduce SONAR, a new multilingual and multimodal fixed-size sentence embedding space. Our single text encoder, covering 200 languages, substantially outperforms existing sentence embeddings such as LASER3 and LabSE on the xsim and xsim++ multilingual similarity search tasks. Speech segments can be embedded in the same SONAR embedding space using language-specific speech encoders trained in a teacher-student setting on speech transcription data. Our encoders outperform existing speech encoders on similarity search tasks. We also provide a text decoder for 200 languages, which allows us to perform text-to-text and speech-to-text machine translation, including for zero-shot language and modality combinations. Our text-to-text results are competitive compared to the state-of-the-art NLLB~1B model, despite the fixed-size bottleneck representation. Our zero-shot speech-to-text translation results compare favorably with strong supervised baselines such as Whisper.

One critical prerequisite for faithful text-to-image generation is the accurate understanding of text inputs. Existing methods leverage the text encoder of the CLIP model to represent input prompts. However, the pre-trained CLIP model can merely encode English with a maximum token length of 77. Moreover, the model capacity of the text encoder from CLIP is relatively limited compared to Large Language Models (LLMs), which offer multilingual input, accommodate longer context, and achieve superior text representation. In this paper, we investigate LLMs as the text encoder to improve the language understanding in text-to-image generation. Unfortunately, training text-to-image generative model with LLMs from scratch demands significant computational resources and data. To this end, we introduce a three-stage training pipeline that effectively and efficiently integrates the existing text-to-image model with LLMs. Specifically, we propose a lightweight adapter that enables fast training of the text-to-image model using the textual representations from LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model supports not only multilingual but also longer input context with superior image generation quality.

State-of-the-art natural language processing systems rely on supervision in the form of annotated data to learn competent models. These models are generally trained on data in a single language (usually English), and cannot be directly used beyond that language. Since collecting data in every language is not realistic, there has been a growing interest in cross-lingual language understanding (XLU) and low-resource cross-language transfer. In this work, we construct an evaluation set for XLU by extending the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus (MultiNLI) to 15 languages, including low-resource languages such as Swahili and Urdu. We hope that our dataset, dubbed XNLI, will catalyze research in cross-lingual sentence understanding by providing an informative standard evaluation task. In addition, we provide several baselines for multilingual sentence understanding, including two based on machine translation systems, and two that use parallel data to train aligned multilingual bag-of-words and LSTM encoders. We find that XNLI represents a practical and challenging evaluation suite, and that directly translating the test data yields the best performance among available baselines.

Language-image pre-training faces significant challenges due to limited data in specific formats and the constrained capacities of text encoders. While prevailing methods attempt to address these issues through data augmentation and architecture modifications, they continue to struggle with processing long-form text inputs, and the inherent limitations of traditional CLIP text encoders lead to suboptimal downstream generalization. In this paper, we propose FLAME (Frozen Large lAnguage Models Enable data-efficient language-image pre-training) that leverages frozen large language models as text encoders, naturally processing long text inputs and demonstrating impressive multilingual generalization. FLAME comprises two key components: 1) a multifaceted prompt distillation technique for extracting diverse semantic representations from long captions, which better aligns with the multifaceted nature of images, and 2) a facet-decoupled attention mechanism, complemented by an offline embedding strategy, to ensure efficient computation. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate FLAME's superior performance. When trained on CC3M, FLAME surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 4.9\% in ImageNet top-1 accuracy. On YFCC15M, FLAME surpasses the WIT-400M-trained CLIP by 44.4\% in average image-to-text recall@1 across 36 languages, and by 34.6\% in text-to-image recall@1 for long-context retrieval on Urban-1k. Code is available at https://github.com/MIV-XJTU/FLAME.

Spoken Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to extracting named entities from speech and categorizing them into types like person, location, organization, etc. In this work, we present VietMed-NER - the first spoken NER dataset in the medical domain. To our best knowledge, our real-world dataset is the largest spoken NER dataset in the world in terms of the number of entity types, featuring 18 distinct types. Secondly, we present baseline results using various state-of-the-art pre-trained models: encoder-only and sequence-to-sequence. We found that pre-trained multilingual models XLM-R outperformed all monolingual models on both reference text and ASR output. Also in general, encoders perform better than sequence-to-sequence models for the NER task. By simply translating, the transcript is applicable not just to Vietnamese but to other languages as well. All code, data and models are made publicly available here: https://github.com/leduckhai/MultiMed

Currently, the integration of mobile Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) is ubiquitous in most people's daily lives. And the ongoing evolution of multimodal large-scale models, such as GPT-4v, Qwen-VL-Max, has significantly bolstered the capabilities of GUI comprehension and user action analysis, showcasing the potentiality of intelligent GUI assistants. However, current GUI Agents often need to access page layout information through calling system APIs, which may pose privacy risks. Fixing GUI (such as mobile interfaces) to a certain low resolution might result in the loss of fine-grained image details. At the same time, the multimodal large models built for GUI Agents currently have poor understanding and decision-making abilities for Chinese GUI interfaces, making them difficult to apply to a large number of Chinese apps. This paper introduces MobileFlow, a multimodal large language model meticulously crafted for mobile GUI agents. Transforming from the open-source model Qwen-VL-Chat into GUI domain, MobileFlow contains approximately 21 billion parameters and is equipped with novel hybrid visual encoders, making it possible for variable resolutions of image inputs and good support for multilingual GUI. By incorporating Mixture of Experts (MoE) expansions and pioneering alignment training strategies, MobileFlow has the capacity to fully interpret image data and comprehend user instructions for GUI interaction tasks. Finally, MobileFlow outperforms Qwen-VL-Max and GPT-4v in terms of task execution by GUI agents on both public and our proposed evaluation metrics, and has been successfully deployed in real-world business contexts, proving its effectiveness for practical applications.

Encoder-only languages models are frequently used for a variety of standard machine learning tasks, including classification and retrieval. However, there has been a lack of recent research for encoder models, especially with respect to multilingual models. We introduce mmBERT, an encoder-only language model pretrained on 3T tokens of multilingual text in over 1800 languages. To build mmBERT we introduce several novel elements, including an inverse mask ratio schedule and an inverse temperature sampling ratio. We add over 1700 low-resource languages to the data mix only during the decay phase, showing that it boosts performance dramatically and maximizes the gains from the relatively small amount of training data. Despite only including these low-resource languages in the short decay phase we achieve similar classification performance to models like OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Overall, we show that mmBERT significantly outperforms the previous generation of models on classification and retrieval tasks -- on both high and low-resource languages.

Multilingual understanding models (or encoder-based), pre-trained via masked language modeling, have achieved promising results on many language understanding tasks (e.g., mBERT). However, these non-autoregressive (NAR) models still struggle to generate high-quality texts compared with autoregressive (AR) models. Considering that encoder-based models have the advantage of efficient generation and self-correction abilities, this paper explores methods to empower multilingual understanding models the generation abilities to get a unified model. Specifically, we start from a multilingual encoder (XLM-R) and propose a Semantic-Guided Alignment-then-Denoising (SGA) approach to adapt an encoder to a multilingual generator with a small number of new parameters. Experiments show that the proposed approach is an effective adaption method, outperforming widely-used initialization-based methods with gains of 9.4 BLEU on machine translation, 8.1 Rouge-L on question generation, and 5.5 METEOR on story generation on XLM-R_{large}. On the other hand, we observe that XLM-R is still inferior to mBART in supervised settings despite better results on zero-shot settings, indicating that more exploration is required to make understanding models strong generators.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) based embedding models have established new state-of-the-art benchmarks for text embedding tasks, particularly in dense vector-based retrieval. However, these models predominantly focus on English, leaving multilingual embedding capabilities largely unexplored. To address this limitation, we present LUSIFER, a novel zero-shot approach that adapts LLM-based embedding models for multilingual tasks without requiring multilingual supervision. LUSIFER's architecture combines a multilingual encoder, serving as a language-universal learner, with an LLM-based embedding model optimized for embedding-specific tasks. These components are seamlessly integrated through a minimal set of trainable parameters that act as a connector, effectively transferring the multilingual encoder's language understanding capabilities to the specialized embedding model. Additionally, to comprehensively evaluate multilingual embedding performance, we introduce a new benchmark encompassing 5 primary embedding tasks, 123 diverse datasets, and coverage across 14 languages. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LUSIFER significantly enhances the multilingual performance across various embedding tasks, particularly for medium and low-resource languages, without requiring explicit multilingual training data.

Adapting multilingual language models to specific languages can enhance both their efficiency and performance. In this study, we explore how modifying the vocabulary of a multilingual encoder model to better suit the Estonian language affects its downstream performance on the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. The motivations for adjusting the vocabulary are twofold: practical benefits affecting the computational cost, such as reducing the input sequence length and the model size, and performance enhancements by tailoring the vocabulary to the particular language. We evaluate the effectiveness of two vocabulary adaptation approaches -- retraining the tokenizer and pruning unused tokens -- and assess their impact on the model's performance, particularly after continual training. While retraining the tokenizer degraded the performance of the NER task, suggesting that longer embedding tuning might be needed, we observed no negative effects on pruning.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive translation capabilities even without being explicitly trained on parallel data. This remarkable property has led some to believe that parallel data is no longer necessary for building multilingual language models. While some attribute this to the emergent abilities of LLMs due to scale, recent work suggests that it is actually caused by incidental bilingual signals present in the training data. Various methods have been proposed to maximize the utility of parallel data to enhance the multilingual capabilities of multilingual encoder-based and encoder-decoder language models. However, some decoder-based LLMs opt to ignore parallel data instead. In this work, we conduct a systematic study on the impact of adding parallel data on LLMs' multilingual capabilities, focusing specifically on translation and multilingual common-sense reasoning. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that parallel data can significantly improve LLMs' multilingual capabilities.

In this work, we compare the domain-specific translation performance of open-source autoregressive decoder-only large language models (LLMs) with task-oriented machine translation (MT) models. Our experiments focus on the medical domain and cover four language pairs with varied resource availability: English-to-French, English-to-Portuguese, English-to-Swahili, and Swahili-to-English. Despite recent advancements, LLMs exhibit a clear gap in specialized translation quality compared to multilingual encoder-decoder MT models such as NLLB-200. In three out of four language directions in our study, NLLB-200 3.3B outperforms all LLMs in the size range of 8B parameters in medical translation. While fine-tuning LLMs such as Mistral and Llama improves their performance at medical translation, these models still fall short compared to fine-tuned NLLB-200 3.3B models. Our findings highlight the ongoing need for specialized MT models to achieve higher-quality domain-specific translation, especially in medium-resource and low-resource settings. As larger LLMs outperform their 8B variants, this also encourages pre-training domain-specific medium-sized LMs to improve quality and efficiency in specialized translation tasks.

The disparity in language resources poses a challenge in multilingual NLP, with high-resource languages benefiting from extensive data, while low-resource languages lack sufficient data for effective training. Our Contrastive Language Alignment with Prompting (CoLAP) method addresses this gap by integrating contrastive learning with cross-lingual representations, facilitating task-specific knowledge transfer from high-resource to lower-resource languages. The primary advantage of our approach is its data efficiency, enabling rapid adaptation to new languages and reducing the need for large labeled datasets. We conduct experiments with multilingual encoder-only and decoder-only language models on natural language understanding tasks, including natural language inference and relation extraction, evaluating performance across both high- and low-resource languages. Our results demonstrate that CoLAP outperforms few-shot cross-lingual transfer baselines and in-context learning, even with limited available data. This effectively narrows the cross-lingual performance gap, contributing to the development of more efficient multilingual NLP techniques.

Counter Narratives (CNs) are non-negative textual responses to Hate Speech (HS) aiming at defusing online hatred and mitigating its spreading across media. Despite the recent increase in HS content posted online, research on automatic CN generation has been relatively scarce and predominantly focused on English. In this paper, we present CONAN-EUS, a new Basque and Spanish dataset for CN generation developed by means of Machine Translation (MT) and professional post-edition. Being a parallel corpus, also with respect to the original English CONAN, it allows to perform novel research on multilingual and crosslingual automatic generation of CNs. Our experiments on CN generation with mT5, a multilingual encoder-decoder model, show that generation greatly benefits from training on post-edited data, as opposed to relying on silver MT data only. These results are confirmed by their correlation with a qualitative manual evaluation, demonstrating that manually revised training data remains crucial for the quality of the generated CNs. Furthermore, multilingual data augmentation improves results over monolingual settings for structurally similar languages such as English and Spanish, while being detrimental for Basque, a language isolate. Similar findings occur in zero-shot crosslingual evaluations, where model transfer (fine-tuning in English and generating in a different target language) outperforms fine-tuning mT5 on machine translated data for Spanish but not for Basque. This provides an interesting insight into the asymmetry in the multilinguality of generative models, a challenging topic which is still open to research.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive multilingual understanding and reasoning capabilities, driven by extensive pre-training multilingual corpora and fine-tuning instruction data. However, a performance gap persists between high-resource and low-resource language tasks due to language imbalance in the pre-training corpus, even using more low-resource data during fine-tuning. To alleviate this issue, we propose LinguaLIFT, a two-stage instruction tuning framework for advancing low-resource language tasks. An additional language alignment layer is first integrated into the LLM to adapt a pre-trained multilingual encoder, thereby enhancing multilingual alignment through code-switched fine-tuning. The second stage fine-tunes LLM with English-only instruction data while freezing the language alignment layer, allowing LLM to transfer task-specific capabilities from English to low-resource language tasks. Additionally, we introduce the Multilingual Math World Problem (MMWP) benchmark, which spans 21 low-resource, 17 medium-resource, and 10 high-resource languages, enabling comprehensive evaluation of multilingual reasoning. Experimental results show that LinguaLIFT outperforms several competitive baselines across MMWP and other widely used benchmarks.

Large Text-to-Image(T2I) diffusion models have shown a remarkable capability to produce photorealistic and diverse images based on text inputs. However, existing works only support limited language input, e.g., English, Chinese, and Japanese, leaving users beyond these languages underserved and blocking the global expansion of T2I models. Therefore, this paper presents AltDiffusion, a novel multilingual T2I diffusion model that supports eighteen different languages. Specifically, we first train a multilingual text encoder based on the knowledge distillation. Then we plug it into a pretrained English-only diffusion model and train the model with a two-stage schema to enhance the multilingual capability, including concept alignment and quality improvement stage on a large-scale multilingual dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a new benchmark, which includes Multilingual-General-18(MG-18) and Multilingual-Cultural-18(MC-18) datasets, to evaluate the capabilities of T2I diffusion models for generating high-quality images and capturing culture-specific concepts in different languages. Experimental results on both MG-18 and MC-18 demonstrate that AltDiffusion outperforms current state-of-the-art T2I models, e.g., Stable Diffusion in multilingual understanding, especially with respect to culture-specific concepts, while still having comparable capability for generating high-quality images.

In this work, we present a conceptually simple and effective method to train a strong bilingual/multilingual multimodal representation model. Starting from the pre-trained multimodal representation model CLIP released by OpenAI, we altered its text encoder with a pre-trained multilingual text encoder XLM-R, and aligned both languages and image representations by a two-stage training schema consisting of teacher learning and contrastive learning. We validate our method through evaluations of a wide range of tasks. We set new state-of-the-art performances on a bunch of tasks including ImageNet-CN, Flicker30k-CN, COCO-CN and XTD. Further, we obtain very close performances with CLIP on almost all tasks, suggesting that one can simply alter the text encoder in CLIP for extended capabilities such as multilingual understanding. Our models and code are available at https://github.com/FlagAI-Open/FlagAI.

Rapidly growing numbers of multilingual news consumers pose an increasing challenge to news recommender systems in terms of providing customized recommendations. First, existing neural news recommenders, even when powered by multilingual language models (LMs), suffer substantial performance losses in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer (ZS-XLT). Second, the current paradigm of fine-tuning the backbone LM of a neural recommender on task-specific data is computationally expensive and infeasible in few-shot recommendation and cold-start setups, where data is scarce or completely unavailable. In this work, we propose a news-adapted sentence encoder (NaSE), domain-specialized from a pretrained massively multilingual sentence encoder (SE). To this end, we construct and leverage PolyNews and PolyNewsParallel, two multilingual news-specific corpora. With the news-adapted multilingual SE in place, we test the effectiveness of (i.e., question the need for) supervised fine-tuning for news recommendation, and propose a simple and strong baseline based on (i) frozen NaSE embeddings and (ii) late click-behavior fusion. We show that NaSE achieves state-of-the-art performance in ZS-XLT in true cold-start and few-shot news recommendation.

Recently, Glyph-ByT5 has achieved highly accurate visual text rendering performance in graphic design images. However, it still focuses solely on English and performs relatively poorly in terms of visual appeal. In this work, we address these two fundamental limitations by presenting Glyph-ByT5-v2 and Glyph-SDXL-v2, which not only support accurate visual text rendering for 10 different languages but also achieve much better aesthetic quality. To achieve this, we make the following contributions: (i) creating a high-quality multilingual glyph-text and graphic design dataset consisting of more than 1 million glyph-text pairs and 10 million graphic design image-text pairs covering nine other languages, (ii) building a multilingual visual paragraph benchmark consisting of 1,000 prompts, with 100 for each language, to assess multilingual visual spelling accuracy, and (iii) leveraging the latest step-aware preference learning approach to enhance the visual aesthetic quality. With the combination of these techniques, we deliver a powerful customized multilingual text encoder, Glyph-ByT5-v2, and a strong aesthetic graphic generation model, Glyph-SDXL-v2, that can support accurate spelling in 10 different languages. We perceive our work as a significant advancement, considering that the latest DALL-E3 and Ideogram 1.0 still struggle with the multilingual visual text rendering task.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) accepts input data in the form of images, videos, or text and generates corresponding natural language text as output. Existing NLG methods mainly adopt a supervised approach and rely heavily on coupled data-to-text pairs. However, for many targeted scenarios and for non-English languages, sufficient quantities of labeled data are often not available. To relax the dependency on labeled data of downstream tasks, we propose an intuitive and effective zero-shot learning framework, ZeroNLG, which can deal with multiple NLG tasks, including image-to-text (image captioning), video-to-text (video captioning), and text-to-text (neural machine translation), across English, Chinese, German, and French within a unified framework. ZeroNLG does not require any labeled downstream pairs for training. During training, ZeroNLG (i) projects different domains (across modalities and languages) to corresponding coordinates in a shared common latent space; (ii) bridges different domains by aligning their corresponding coordinates in this space; and (iii) builds an unsupervised multilingual auto-encoder to learn to generate text by reconstructing the input text given its coordinate in shared latent space. Consequently, during inference, based on the data-to-text pipeline, ZeroNLG can generate target sentences across different languages given the coordinate of input data in the common space. Within this unified framework, given visual (imaging or video) data as input, ZeroNLG can perform zero-shot visual captioning; given textual sentences as input, ZeroNLG can perform zero-shot machine translation. We present the results of extensive experiments on twelve NLG tasks, showing that, without using any labeled downstream pairs for training, ZeroNLG generates high-quality and believable outputs and significantly outperforms existing zero-shot methods.

Tasks such as semantic search and clustering on crisis-related social media texts enhance our comprehension of crisis discourse, aiding decision-making and targeted interventions. Pre-trained language models have advanced performance in crisis informatics, but their contextual embeddings lack semantic meaningfulness. Although the CrisisTransformers family includes a sentence encoder to address the semanticity issue, it remains monolingual, processing only English texts. Furthermore, employing separate models for different languages leads to embeddings in distinct vector spaces, introducing challenges when comparing semantic similarities between multi-lingual texts. Therefore, we propose multi-lingual sentence encoders (CT-XLMR-SE and CT-mBERT-SE) that embed crisis-related social media texts for over 50 languages, such that texts with similar meanings are in close proximity within the same vector space, irrespective of language diversity. Results in sentence encoding and sentence matching tasks are promising, suggesting these models could serve as robust baselines when embedding multi-lingual crisis-related social media texts. The models are publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/crisistransformers.

CLaMP 3 is a unified framework developed to address challenges of cross-modal and cross-lingual generalization in music information retrieval. Using contrastive learning, it aligns all major music modalities--including sheet music, performance signals, and audio recordings--with multilingual text in a shared representation space, enabling retrieval across unaligned modalities with text as a bridge. It features a multilingual text encoder adaptable to unseen languages, exhibiting strong cross-lingual generalization. Leveraging retrieval-augmented generation, we curated M4-RAG, a web-scale dataset consisting of 2.31 million music-text pairs. This dataset is enriched with detailed metadata that represents a wide array of global musical traditions. To advance future research, we release WikiMT-X, a benchmark comprising 1,000 triplets of sheet music, audio, and richly varied text descriptions. Experiments show that CLaMP 3 achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple MIR tasks, significantly surpassing previous strong baselines and demonstrating excellent generalization in multimodal and multilingual music contexts.

We propose the SAMU-XLSR: Semantically-Aligned Multimodal Utterance-level Cross-Lingual Speech Representation learning framework. Unlike previous works on speech representation learning, which learns multilingual contextual speech embedding at the resolution of an acoustic frame (10-20ms), this work focuses on learning multimodal (speech-text) multilingual speech embedding at the resolution of a sentence (5-10s) such that the embedding vector space is semantically aligned across different languages. We combine state-of-the-art multilingual acoustic frame-level speech representation learning model XLS-R with the Language Agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding (LaBSE) model to create an utterance-level multimodal multilingual speech encoder SAMU-XLSR. Although we train SAMU-XLSR with only multilingual transcribed speech data, cross-lingual speech-text and speech-speech associations emerge in its learned representation space. To substantiate our claims, we use SAMU-XLSR speech encoder in combination with a pre-trained LaBSE text sentence encoder for cross-lingual speech-to-text translation retrieval, and SAMU-XLSR alone for cross-lingual speech-to-speech translation retrieval. We highlight these applications by performing several cross-lingual text and speech translation retrieval tasks across several datasets.

Challenges in managing linguistic diversity and integrating various musical modalities are faced by current music information retrieval systems. These limitations reduce their effectiveness in a global, multimodal music environment. To address these issues, we introduce CLaMP 2, a system compatible with 101 languages that supports both ABC notation (a text-based musical notation format) and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) for music information retrieval. CLaMP 2, pre-trained on 1.5 million ABC-MIDI-text triplets, includes a multilingual text encoder and a multimodal music encoder aligned via contrastive learning. By leveraging large language models, we obtain refined and consistent multilingual descriptions at scale, significantly reducing textual noise and balancing language distribution. Our experiments show that CLaMP 2 achieves state-of-the-art results in both multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities, thus establishing a new standard for inclusive and global music information retrieval.

We introduce the first open-source model for translation between the vulnerable Chechen language and Russian, and the dataset collected to train and evaluate it. We explore fine-tuning capabilities for including a new language into a large language model system for multilingual translation NLLB-200. The BLEU / ChrF++ scores for our model are 8.34 / 34.69 and 20.89 / 44.55 for translation from Russian to Chechen and reverse direction, respectively. The release of the translation models is accompanied by the distribution of parallel words, phrases and sentences corpora and multilingual sentence encoder adapted to the Chechen language.

We present the first neural machine translation system for translation between the endangered Erzya language and Russian and the dataset collected by us to train and evaluate it. The BLEU scores are 17 and 19 for translation to Erzya and Russian respectively, and more than half of the translations are rated as acceptable by native speakers. We also adapt our model to translate between Erzya and 10 other languages, but without additional parallel data, the quality on these directions remains low. We release the translation models along with the collected text corpus, a new language identification model, and a multilingual sentence encoder adapted for the Erzya language. These resources will be available at https://github.com/slone-nlp/myv-nmt.

We introduce two pre-trained retrieval focused multilingual sentence encoding models, respectively based on the Transformer and CNN model architectures. The models embed text from 16 languages into a single semantic space using a multi-task trained dual-encoder that learns tied representations using translation based bridge tasks (Chidambaram al., 2018). The models provide performance that is competitive with the state-of-the-art on: semantic retrieval (SR), translation pair bitext retrieval (BR) and retrieval question answering (ReQA). On English transfer learning tasks, our sentence-level embeddings approach, and in some cases exceed, the performance of monolingual, English only, sentence embedding models. Our models are made available for download on TensorFlow Hub.

Self-Supervised Learning is vastly used to efficiently represent speech for Spoken Language Understanding, gradually replacing conventional approaches. Meanwhile, textual SSL models are proposed to encode language-agnostic semantics. SAMU-XLSR framework employed this semantic information to enrich multilingual speech representations. A recent study investigated SAMU-XLSR in-domain semantic enrichment by specializing it on downstream transcriptions, leading to state-of-the-art results on a challenging SLU task. This study's interest lies in the loss of multilingual performances and lack of specific-semantics training induced by such specialization in close languages without any SLU implication. We also consider SAMU-XLSR's loss of initial cross-lingual abilities due to a separate SLU fine-tuning. Therefore, this paper proposes a dual task learning approach to improve SAMU-XLSR semantic enrichment while considering distant languages for multilingual and language portability experiments.