Behind Maya: Building a Multilingual Vision Language Model
Authors: name: Nahid Alam; name: Karthik Reddy Kanjula; name: Surya Guthikonda; name: Timothy Chung; name: Bala Krishna S Vegesna; name: Abhipsha Das; name: Anthony Susevski; name: Ryan Sze-Yin Chan; name: S M Iftekhar Uddin; name: Shayekh Bin Islam; name: Roshan Santhosh; name: Snegha A; name: Drishti Sharma; name: Chen Liu; name: Isha Chaturvedi; name: Genta Indra Winata; name: Ashvanth. S; name: Snehanshu Mukherjee; name: Alham Fikri Aji
Published: 2025-05-13 19:01:12

Abstract: In recent times, we have seen a rapid development of large Vision-Language
Models (VLMs). They have shown impressive results on academic benchmarks,
primarily in widely spoken languages but lack performance on low-resource
languages and varied cultural contexts. To address these limitations, we
introduce Maya, an open-source Multilingual VLM. Our contributions are: 1) a
multilingual image-text pretraining dataset in eight languages, based on the
LLaVA pretraining dataset; and 2) a multilingual image-text model supporting
these languages, enhancing cultural and linguistic comprehension in
vision-language tasks. Code available at https://github.com/nahidalam/maya.