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arXiv · 2109.05125

MURAL: Multimodal, Multitask Retrieval Across Languages

Aashi Jain·Mandy Guo·Krishna Srinivasan·Ting Chen·Sneha Kudugunta·Chao Jia·Yinfei Yang·Jason Baldridge
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Abstract

Both image-caption pairs and translation pairs provide the means to learn deep representations of and connections between languages. We use both types of pairs in MURAL (MUltimodal, MUltitask Representations Across Languages), a dual encoder that solves two tasks: 1) image-text matching and 2) translation pair matching. By incorporating billions of translation pairs, MURAL extends ALIGN (Jia et al. PMLR'21)--a state-of-the-art dual encoder learned from 1.8 billion noisy image-text pairs. When using the same encoders, MURAL's performance matches or exceeds ALIGN's cross-modal retrieval performance on well-resourced languages across several datasets. More importantly, it considerably improves performance on under-resourced languages, showing that text-text learning can overcome a paucity of image-caption examples for these languages. On the Wikipedia Image-Text dataset, for example, MURAL-base improves zero-shot mean recall by 8.1% on average for eight under-resourced languages and by 6.8% on average when fine-tuning. We additionally show that MURAL's text representations cluster not only with respect to genealogical connections but also based on areal linguistics, such as the Balkan Sprachbund.

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Aashi Jain, Mandy Guo, Krishna Srinivasan, Ting Chen, Sneha Kudugunta, Chao Jia, Yinfei Yang, Jason Baldridge. 2021-09-10. MURAL: Multimodal, Multitask Retrieval Across Languages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05125

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