Behind Maya: Building a Multilingual Vision Language Model

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.

Understanding and Mitigating Toxicity in Image-Text Pretraining Datasets: A Case Study on LLaVA

Pretraining datasets are foundational to the development of multimodal models, yet they often have inherent biases and toxic content from the web-scale corpora they are sourced from. In this paper, we investigate the prevalence of toxicity in LLaVA image-text pretraining dataset, examining how harmful content manifests in different modalities. We present a comprehensive analysis of common toxicity categories and propose targeted mitigation strategies, resulting in the creation of a refined toxicity-mitigated dataset. This dataset removes 7,531 of toxic image-text pairs in the LLaVA pre-training dataset. We offer guidelines for implementing robust toxicity detection pipelines. Our findings underscore the need to actively identify and filter toxic content - such as hate speech, explicit imagery, and targeted harassment - to build more responsible and equitable multimodal systems. The toxicity-mitigated dataset is open source and is available for further research.

Maya: An Instruction Finetuned Multilingual Multimodal Model

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.

Vision Transformers for Mobile Applications: A Short Survey

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on many Computer Vision Tasks. Unfortunately, deploying these large-scale ViTs is resource-consuming and impossible for many mobile devices. While most in the community are building for larger and larger ViTs, we ask a completely opposite question: How small can a ViT be within the tradeoffs of accuracy and inference latency that make it suitable for mobile deployment? We look into a few ViTs specifically designed for mobile applications and observe that they modify the transformer's architecture or are built around the combination of CNN and transformer. Recent work has also attempted to create sparse ViT networks and proposed alternatives to the attention module. In this paper, we study these architectures, identify the challenges and analyze what really makes a vision transformer suitable for mobile applications. We aim to serve as a baseline for future research direction and hopefully lay the foundation to choose the exemplary vision transformer architecture for your application running on mobile devices.