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Main Authors: Nguyen, Thao, Wallingford, Matthew, Santy, Sebastin, Ma, Wei-Chiu, Oh, Sewoong, Schmidt, Ludwig, Koh, Pang Wei, Krishna, Ranjay
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16915
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author Nguyen, Thao
Wallingford, Matthew
Santy, Sebastin
Ma, Wei-Chiu
Oh, Sewoong
Schmidt, Ludwig
Koh, Pang Wei
Krishna, Ranjay
author_facet Nguyen, Thao
Wallingford, Matthew
Santy, Sebastin
Ma, Wei-Chiu
Oh, Sewoong
Schmidt, Ludwig
Koh, Pang Wei
Krishna, Ranjay
contents Massive web-crawled image-text datasets lay the foundation for recent progress in multimodal learning. These datasets are designed with the goal of training a model to do well on standard computer vision benchmarks, many of which, however, have been shown to be English-centric (e.g., ImageNet). Consequently, existing data curation techniques gravitate towards using predominantly English image-text pairs and discard many potentially useful non-English samples. Our work questions this practice. Multilingual data is inherently enriching not only because it provides a gateway to learn about culturally salient concepts, but also because it depicts common concepts differently from monolingual data. We thus conduct a systematic study to explore the performance benefits of using more samples of non-English origins with respect to English vision tasks. By translating all multilingual image-text pairs from a raw web crawl to English and re-filtering them, we increase the prevalence of (translated) multilingual data in the resulting training set. Pre-training on this dataset outperforms using English-only or English-dominated datasets on ImageNet, ImageNet distribution shifts, image-English-text retrieval and on average across 38 tasks from the DataComp benchmark. On a geographically diverse task like GeoDE, we also observe improvements across all regions, with the biggest gain coming from Africa. In addition, we quantitatively show that English and non-English data are significantly different in both image and (translated) text space. We hope that our findings motivate future work to be more intentional about including multicultural and multilingual data, not just when non-English or geographically diverse tasks are involved, but to enhance model capabilities at large. All translated captions and metadata (language, CLIP score, etc.) are available on HuggingFace.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_16915
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multilingual Diversity Improves Vision-Language Representations
Nguyen, Thao
Wallingford, Matthew
Santy, Sebastin
Ma, Wei-Chiu
Oh, Sewoong
Schmidt, Ludwig
Koh, Pang Wei
Krishna, Ranjay
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Massive web-crawled image-text datasets lay the foundation for recent progress in multimodal learning. These datasets are designed with the goal of training a model to do well on standard computer vision benchmarks, many of which, however, have been shown to be English-centric (e.g., ImageNet). Consequently, existing data curation techniques gravitate towards using predominantly English image-text pairs and discard many potentially useful non-English samples. Our work questions this practice. Multilingual data is inherently enriching not only because it provides a gateway to learn about culturally salient concepts, but also because it depicts common concepts differently from monolingual data. We thus conduct a systematic study to explore the performance benefits of using more samples of non-English origins with respect to English vision tasks. By translating all multilingual image-text pairs from a raw web crawl to English and re-filtering them, we increase the prevalence of (translated) multilingual data in the resulting training set. Pre-training on this dataset outperforms using English-only or English-dominated datasets on ImageNet, ImageNet distribution shifts, image-English-text retrieval and on average across 38 tasks from the DataComp benchmark. On a geographically diverse task like GeoDE, we also observe improvements across all regions, with the biggest gain coming from Africa. In addition, we quantitatively show that English and non-English data are significantly different in both image and (translated) text space. We hope that our findings motivate future work to be more intentional about including multicultural and multilingual data, not just when non-English or geographically diverse tasks are involved, but to enhance model capabilities at large. All translated captions and metadata (language, CLIP score, etc.) are available on HuggingFace.
title Multilingual Diversity Improves Vision-Language Representations
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16915