PLaMo 2.1-VL Technical Report

We introduce PLaMo 2.1-VL, a lightweight Vision Language Model (VLM) for autonomous devices, available in 8B and 2B variants and designed for local and edge deployment with Japanese-language operation. Focusing on Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Visual Grounding as its core capabilities, we develop and evaluate the models for two real-world application scenarios: factory task analysis via tool recognition, and infrastructure anomaly detection. We also develop a large-scale synthetic data generation pipeline and comprehensive Japanese training and evaluation resources. PLaMo 2.1-VL outperforms comparable open models on Japanese and English benchmarks, achieving 61.5 ROUGE-L on JA-VG-VQA-500 and 85.2% accuracy on Japanese Ref-L4. For the two application scenarios, it achieves 53.9% zero-shot accuracy on factory task analysis, and fine-tuning on power plant data improves anomaly detection bbox + label F1-score from 39.7 to 64.9.

Enhancing Large Language Model-based Speech Recognition by Contextualization for Rare and Ambiguous Words

We develop a large language model (LLM) based automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that can be contextualized by providing keywords as prior information in text prompts. We adopt decoder-only architecture and use our in-house LLM, PLaMo-100B, pre-trained from scratch using datasets dominated by Japanese and English texts as the decoder. We adopt a pre-trained Whisper encoder as an audio encoder, and the audio embeddings from the audio encoder are projected to the text embedding space by an adapter layer and concatenated with text embeddings converted from text prompts to form inputs to the decoder. By providing keywords as prior information in the text prompts, we can contextualize our LLM-based ASR system without modifying the model architecture to transcribe ambiguous words in the input audio accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that providing keywords to the decoder can significantly improve the recognition performance of rare and ambiguous words.