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

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.