Multilingual VLM Training: Adapting an English-Trained VLM to French

TL;DR

This paper investigates methods for adapting English-trained Vision--Language Models to French, highlighting translation quality as a key bottleneck and emphasizing native dataset collection for better multilingual performance.

Contribution

It compares different adaptation strategies for multilingual VLMs, revealing translation quality as a critical factor and proposing focus on native data collection.

Findings

Translation quality limits multilingual VLM performance.

Native-language datasets are crucial for effective adaptation.

Current translation-based methods face significant bottlenecks.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence has made great progress in recent years, particularly in the development of Vision--Language Models (VLMs) that understand both visual and textual data. However, these advancements remain largely limited to English, reducing their accessibility for non--English speakers. It is essential to extend these capabilities to a broader range of languages. This paper explores the challenges of adapting an English-trained VLM to different languages. To this end, we will explore and compare different methods for their performance and computational cost. We consider a translation-based pipeline, LoRA finetuning, and a two-stage finetuning strategy that separates vision adaptation from language adaptation. To evaluate these methods, we use a combination of standard multimodal benchmarks translated into the target language and manual assessments by native experts. The results reveal that dataset translation remains a major bottleneck in multilingual VLM performance, with data quality limiting the effectiveness of training and evaluation. These findings suggest that future efforts should focus on native-language dataset collection and improved translation strategies.