Large Multilingual Models Pivot Zero-Shot Multimodal Learning across Languages
/ Authors
Jinyi Hu, Yuan Yao, Chong Wang, Shanonan Wang, Yinxu Pan, Qi-An Chen, Tianyu Yu, Han Wu, Yue Zhao, Haoye Zhang
and 6 more authors
Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Jiao Xue, Dahai Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
/ Abstract
Recently there has been a significant surge in multimodal learning in terms of both image-to-text and text-to-image generation. However, the success is typically limited to English, leaving other languages largely behind. Building a competitive counterpart in other languages is highly challenging due to the low-resource nature of non-English multimodal data (i.e., lack of large-scale, high-quality image-text data). In this work, we propose MPM, an effective training paradigm for training large multimodal models in non-English languages. MPM demonstrates that Multilingual language models can Pivot zero-shot Multimodal learning across languages. Specifically, based on a strong multilingual large language model, multimodal models pretrained on English-only image-text data can well generalize to other languages in a (quasi)-zero-shot manner, even surpassing models trained on image-text data in native languages. Taking Chinese as a practice of MPM, we build large multimodal models VisCPM in image-to-text and text-to-image generation, which achieve state-of-the-art (open-source) performance in Chinese. To facilitate future research, we open-source codes and model weights at https://github.com/OpenBMB/VisCPM.git.
Journal: ArXiv