Multimodal Pre-training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity in XTREME

Pre-trained multilingual language encoders, such as multilingual BERT and XLM-R, show great potential for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. However, these multilingual encoders do not precisely align words and phrases across languages. Especially, learning alignments in the multilingual embedding space usually requires sentence-level or word-level parallel corpora, which are expensive to be obtained for low-resource languages. An alternative is to make the multilingual encoders more robust; when fine-tuning the encoder using downstream task, we train the encoder to tolerate noise in the contex

Research goal: What is the impact of multimodal pre-training (text + images/audio) on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance for semantic similarity tasks in XTREME, compared to text-only models, and does multimodal alignment improve robustness across low-resource languages?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.4/10.