DialectGen: Benchmarking and Improving Dialect Robustness in Multimodal Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhou, Yu, An, Sohyun, Deng, Haikang, Yin, Da, Peng, Clark, Hsieh, Cho-Jui, Chang, Kai-Wei, Peng, Nanyun
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhou, Yu
An, Sohyun
Deng, Haikang
Yin, Da
Peng, Clark
Hsieh, Cho-Jui
Chang, Kai-Wei
Peng, Nanyun
author_facet Zhou, Yu
An, Sohyun
Deng, Haikang
Yin, Da
Peng, Clark
Hsieh, Cho-Jui
Chang, Kai-Wei
Peng, Nanyun
contents Contact languages like English exhibit rich regional variations in the form of dialects, which are often used by dialect speakers interacting with generative models. However, can multimodal generative models effectively produce content given dialectal textual input? In this work, we study this question by constructing a new large-scale benchmark spanning six common English dialects. We work with dialect speakers to collect and verify over 4200 unique prompts and evaluate on 17 image and video generative models. Our automatic and human evaluation results show that current state-of-the-art multimodal generative models exhibit 32.26% to 48.17% performance degradation when a single dialect word is used in the prompt. Common mitigation methods such as fine-tuning and prompt rewriting can only improve dialect performance by small margins (< 7%), while potentially incurring significant performance degradation in Standard American English (SAE). To this end, we design a general encoder-based mitigation strategy for multimodal generative models. Our method teaches the model to recognize new dialect features while preserving SAE performance. Experiments on models such as Stable Diffusion 1.5 show that our method is able to simultaneously raise performance on five dialects to be on par with SAE (+34.4%), while incurring near zero cost to SAE performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14949
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DialectGen: Benchmarking and Improving Dialect Robustness in Multimodal Generation
Zhou, Yu
An, Sohyun
Deng, Haikang
Yin, Da
Peng, Clark
Hsieh, Cho-Jui
Chang, Kai-Wei
Peng, Nanyun
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Contact languages like English exhibit rich regional variations in the form of dialects, which are often used by dialect speakers interacting with generative models. However, can multimodal generative models effectively produce content given dialectal textual input? In this work, we study this question by constructing a new large-scale benchmark spanning six common English dialects. We work with dialect speakers to collect and verify over 4200 unique prompts and evaluate on 17 image and video generative models. Our automatic and human evaluation results show that current state-of-the-art multimodal generative models exhibit 32.26% to 48.17% performance degradation when a single dialect word is used in the prompt. Common mitigation methods such as fine-tuning and prompt rewriting can only improve dialect performance by small margins (< 7%), while potentially incurring significant performance degradation in Standard American English (SAE). To this end, we design a general encoder-based mitigation strategy for multimodal generative models. Our method teaches the model to recognize new dialect features while preserving SAE performance. Experiments on models such as Stable Diffusion 1.5 show that our method is able to simultaneously raise performance on five dialects to be on par with SAE (+34.4%), while incurring near zero cost to SAE performance.
title DialectGen: Benchmarking and Improving Dialect Robustness in Multimodal Generation
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14949