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Maya: Bridging Language and Images

Maya connects visuals and text across languages for enhanced understanding.

Nahid Alam, Karthik Reddy Kanjula, Surya Guthikonda, Timothy Chung, Bala Krishna S Vegesna, Abhipsha Das, Anthony Susevski, Ryan Sze-Yin Chan, S M Iftekhar Uddin, Shayekh Bin Islam, Roshan Santhosh, Snegha A, Drishti Sharma, Chen Liu, Isha Chaturvedi, Genta Indra Winata, Ashvanth. S, Snehanshu Mukherjee, Alham Fikri Aji

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Table of Contents

In our world, machines are getting smarter every day. One of the exciting areas of development is teaching machines to understand both pictures and words. This is where Maya steps in, showing off what it can do with Languages and visuals. Think of Maya as a helpful robot that can not only read but can also look at pictures and make sense of them across different languages.

The Challenge of Language Barriers

Most of the fancy models that understand pictures and words are designed for widely spoken languages, like English. This leaves out a lot of people who speak less common languages. It’s like having a super cool café, but only a few people can get in because they don’t speak the secret password. This is a big problem if we want everyone to enjoy the benefits of advanced technology.

What Maya Does

Maya aims to bridge this gap. It’s designed to work with eight languages, making it friendlier for more people. This means that Maya can take a picture, look at it, and also read text to give smart responses, all while being respectful of language and culture. It’s like asking a multi-lingual friend for help when you’re in a foreign country.

Building a Better Dataset

To create Maya, the developers built a special dataset. Imagine a giant library filled with books, but these books have pictures and captions in eight different languages. It’s a mix of cool visuals and written words to train Maya. The team made sure that this library was not only big but also clean. They removed any harmful or mean content because nobody wants a robot that learned from bad examples.

Keeping It Safe and Clean

The developers took extra steps to ensure the dataset was free from toxicity. They used special tools to scan the Images and captions for anything that could be considered offensive or harmful. This meant they could focus on learning without picking up bad habits. Just like how eating your veggies makes you strong, a clean dataset makes Maya smart.

Training Maya

Maya was trained using powerful computers, sort of like having a super brain to learn all this information quickly. As Maya learned, it practiced translating text and understanding images. The process took a considerable amount of time, but in the end, it became a good listener, capable of answering questions about what it sees.

How Maya Works

Maya’s brain is made up of two parts: a language part and a vision part. The language part helps answer questions and understand text, while the vision part looks at images and figures out what they show. Together, they make a perfect team, much like peanut butter and jelly.

Testing Maya’s Skills

Once trained, Maya was put to the test. By asking Maya questions and showing it various images, the developers could see how well it responded. It was like a student taking a final exam after a long school year. With its results, they could see where it excelled and where it needed a bit more practice.

A Multilingual Model for Many Uses

Maya is not just for fun; it has real-world applications. Imagine a tourist in a foreign country who comes across a sign written in a language they don’t understand. With Maya, they could snap a picture of the sign and get a translation. Or think of students learning about different cultures through pictures, with Maya providing smart insights into what they see.

Looking at Maya’s Performance

In testing, Maya did impressively well. Although it faced some challenges, it handled the questions and photos well, proving that it was a reliable tool for understanding visuals and text. Like a good student, Maya learned from its mistakes and improved over time.

What Makes Maya Unique

Maya's ability to work in multiple languages, understand cultural differences, and filter out harmful content sets it apart in the tech world. While others might focus only on English and ignore everyone else, Maya opens its arms to include a broader audience. This inclusivity is not just a nice touch; it’s essential for technology to be accessible to all.

Future Improvements

As cool as Maya is right now, there’s always room for improvement. The developers are looking at ways to make it even better. They want to expand the languages it can understand and refine its ability to handle more complex questions. With a little love and care, Maya can grow to be even smarter and more helpful.

Conclusion

Maya is changing the game by combining visual and text understanding in a multilingual model. With its emphasis on safety, cultural sensitivity, and accessibility, Maya is paving the way for a tech future that caters to everyone, no matter what language they speak. It's like having a translator, a guide, and a friend, all rolled into one, making the world a more connected and friendly place.

Original Source

Title: Maya: An Instruction Finetuned Multilingual Multimodal Model

Abstract: The rapid development of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has led to impressive results on academic benchmarks, primarily in widely spoken languages. However, significant gaps remain in the ability of current VLMs to handle low-resource languages and varied cultural contexts, largely due to a lack of high-quality, diverse, and safety-vetted data. Consequently, these models often struggle to understand low-resource languages and cultural nuances in a manner free from toxicity. To address these limitations, we introduce Maya, an open-source Multimodal Multilingual model. Our contributions are threefold: 1) a multilingual image-text pretraining dataset in eight languages, based on the LLaVA pretraining dataset; 2) a thorough analysis of toxicity within the LLaVA dataset, followed by the creation of a novel toxicity-free version across eight languages; and 3) 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.

Authors: Nahid Alam, Karthik Reddy Kanjula, Surya Guthikonda, Timothy Chung, Bala Krishna S Vegesna, Abhipsha Das, Anthony Susevski, Ryan Sze-Yin Chan, S M Iftekhar Uddin, Shayekh Bin Islam, Roshan Santhosh, Snegha A, Drishti Sharma, Chen Liu, Isha Chaturvedi, Genta Indra Winata, Ashvanth. S, Snehanshu Mukherjee, Alham Fikri Aji

Last Update: 2024-12-09 00:00:00

Language: English

Source URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07112

Source PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07112

Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Changes: This summary was created with assistance from AI and may have inaccuracies. For accurate information, please refer to the original source documents linked here.

Thank you to arxiv for use of its open access interoperability.

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