PALO: A Polyglot Large Multimodal Model for 5B People
Authors: name: Muhammad Maaz, name: Hanoona Rasheed, name: Abdelrahman Shaker, name: Salman Khan, name: Hisham Cholakal, name: Rao M. Anwer, name: Tim Baldwin, name: Michael Felsberg, name: Fahad S. Khan

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 sim5B 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.