Where Do Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders Fail on Low-Resource Languages?

arXiv:2608.30725 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-08-31 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-08-31

Updated: 2026-08-31

Code: https://github.com/dnotitia/geometric-bottleneck

Terminology

• Calibration — 74× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Benchmark — 42× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 37× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Accuracy — 24× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Embeddings — 17× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 14× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Redundancy — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Modality Gap — 7× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Transformer — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Activation Patching — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Clustering — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Low-Resource Languages — 4× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Distillation — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Representation Learning — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition — 2× in this paper
• Cosine Similarity — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Interpretability — 2× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Anisotropy — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Distribution Shift — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Knowledge Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 11 episodes
• Linear Probing — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Semantic Understanding — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Visual Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Towards Zero-shot Cross-lingual Image Retrieval
• GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
• All-but-the-Top: Simple and Effective Postprocessing for Word Representations
• No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation
• SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features
• NLLB-CLIP -- train performant multilingual image retrieval model on a budget

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