PALO: A Polyglot Large Multimodal Model for 5B People

Hanoona Rasheed, Muhammad Maaz, Abdelrahman Shaker, Salman Khan, Hisham Cholakkal, Rao M. Anwer, Tim Baldwin, Michael Felsberg, Fahad S. Khan; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 1745-1754

In pursuit of more inclusive Vision-Language Models (VLMs) this study introduces a Large Multilingual Multimodal Model called PALO. PALO offers visual reasoning capabilities in 10 major languages including English Chinese Hindi Spanish French Arabic Bengali Russian Urdu and Japanese that span a total of 5B people (65% of the world population). Our approach involves a semi-automated translation approach to adapt the multimodal instruction dataset from English to the target languages using a fine-tuned Large Language Model thereby ensuring high linguistic fidelity while allowing scalability due to minimal manual effort. The incorporation of diverse instruction sets helps us boost overall performance across multiple languages especially those that are underrepresented like Hindi Arabic Bengali and Urdu. The resulting models are trained across three scales (1.7B 7B and 13B parameters) to show the generalization and scalability where we observe substantial improvements compared to strong baselines. We also propose the first multilingual multimodal benchmark for the forthcoming approaches to evaluate their vision-language reasoning capabilities across languages. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/PALO.