Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study for Basque

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Arana, Lukas, Etxaniz, Julen, Salaberria, Ander, Azkune, Gorka
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Arana, Lukas
Etxaniz, Julen
Salaberria, Ander
Azkune, Gorka
author_facet Arana, Lukas
Etxaniz, Julen
Salaberria, Ander
Azkune, Gorka
contents Current Multimodal Large Language Models exhibit very strong performance for several demanding tasks. While commercial MLLMs deliver acceptable performance in low-resource languages, comparable results remain unattained within the open science community. In this paper, we aim to develop a strong MLLM for a low-resource language, namely Basque. For that purpose, we develop our own training and evaluation image-text datasets. Using two different Large Language Models as backbones, the Llama-3.1-Instruct model and a Basque-adapted variant called Latxa, we explore several data mixtures for training. We show that: i) low ratios of Basque multimodal data (around 20%) are already enough to obtain solid results on Basque benchmarks, and ii) contrary to expected, a Basque instructed backbone LLM is not required to obtain a strong MLLM in Basque. Our results pave the way to develop MLLMs for other low-resource languages by openly releasing our resources.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09396
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study for Basque
Arana, Lukas
Etxaniz, Julen
Salaberria, Ander
Azkune, Gorka
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Current Multimodal Large Language Models exhibit very strong performance for several demanding tasks. While commercial MLLMs deliver acceptable performance in low-resource languages, comparable results remain unattained within the open science community. In this paper, we aim to develop a strong MLLM for a low-resource language, namely Basque. For that purpose, we develop our own training and evaluation image-text datasets. Using two different Large Language Models as backbones, the Llama-3.1-Instruct model and a Basque-adapted variant called Latxa, we explore several data mixtures for training. We show that: i) low ratios of Basque multimodal data (around 20%) are already enough to obtain solid results on Basque benchmarks, and ii) contrary to expected, a Basque instructed backbone LLM is not required to obtain a strong MLLM in Basque. Our results pave the way to develop MLLMs for other low-resource languages by openly releasing our resources.
title Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study for Basque
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09396