Current multimodal machine translation (MMT) systems rely on fully supervised data (i.e sentences with their translations and accompanying images), which is costly to collect and prevents the extension of MMT to language pairs with no such data. We propose a method to bypass the need for fully supervised data to train MMT systems, using multimodal English data only. Our method ( ZeroMMT) consists in adapting a strong text-only machine translation (MT) model by training it jointly on two objectives: visually conditioned masked language modelling and the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the original MT and new MMT outputs. We evaluate on standard MMT benchmarks and on CoMMuTE, a contrastive test set designed to evaluate how well models use images to disambiguate translations. ZeroMMT obtains disambiguation results close to state-of-the-art MMT models trained on fully supervised examples. To prove that ZeroMMT generalizes to languages with no fully supervised training data, we extend CoMMuTE to three new languages: Arabic, Russian and Chinese. We also show that we can control the trade-off between disambiguation capabilities and translation fidelity at inference time using classifier-free guidance and without any additional data. Our code, data and trained models are publicly accessible.

One of the major challenges of machine translation (MT) is ambiguity, which can in some cases be resolved by accompanying context such as images. However, recent work in multimodal MT (MMT) has shown that obtaining improvements from images is challenging, limited not only by the difficulty of building effective cross-modal representations, but also by the lack of specific evaluation and training data. We present a new MMT approach based on a strong text-only MT model, which uses neural adapters, a novel guided self-attention mechanism and which is jointly trained on both visually-conditioned masking and MMT. We also introduce CoMMuTE, a Contrastive Multilingual Multimodal Translation Evaluation set of ambiguous sentences and their possible translations, accompanied by disambiguating images corresponding to each translation. Our approach obtains competitive results compared to strong text-only models on standard English→French, English→German and English→Czech benchmarks and outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art MMT systems by a large margin on our contrastive test set. Our code and CoMMuTE are freely available.

We present a framework that formulates visual question answering as modular code generation. In contrast to prior work on modular approaches to VQA, our approach requires no additional training and relies on pre-trained language models (LMs), visual models pre-trained on image-caption pairs, and fifty VQA examples used for in-context learning. The generated Python programs invoke and compose the outputs of the visual models using arithmetic and conditional logic. Our approach improves accuracy on the COVR dataset by at least 3% and on the GQA dataset by 2% compared to the few-shot baseline that does not employ code generation.