Behind Maya: Building a Multilingual Vision Language Model
cs.CV
/ Authors
Nahid Alam, Karthik Reddy Kanjula, Surya Guthikonda, Timothy Chung, Bala Krishna S Vegesna, Abhipsha Das, Anthony Susevski, Ryan Sze-Yin Chan, S M Iftekhar Uddin, Shayekh Bin Islam
and 9 more authors
Roshan Santhosh, Snegha A, Drishti Sharma, Chen Liu, Isha Chaturvedi, Genta Indra Winata, Ashvanth. S, Snehanshu Mukherjee, Alham Fikri Aji
/ Abstract
In recent times, we have seen a rapid development of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs). They have shown impressive results on academic benchmarks, primarily in widely spoken languages but lack performance on low-resource languages and varied cultural contexts. To address these limitations, we introduce Maya, an open-source Multilingual VLM. Our contributions are: 1) a multilingual image-text pretraining dataset in eight languages, based on the LLaVA pretraining dataset; and 2) a multilingual image-text model supporting these languages, enhancing cultural and linguistic comprehension in vision-language tasks. Code available at https://github.com/nahidalam/maya.