Machine Translation
Layer-Wise Coordination between Encoder and Decoder for Neural Machine Translation
Tianyu He, Xu Tan, Yingce Xia, Di He, Tao Qin, Zhibo Chen, Tie-Yan Liu
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved remarkable progress with the quick evolvement of model structures. In this paper, we propose the concept of layer-wise coordination for NMT, which explicitly coordinates the learning of hidden representations of the encoder and decoder together layer by layer, gradually from low level to high level.
Middle-Out Decoding
To facilitate information flow and maintain consistent decoding, we introduce a dual self-attention mechanism that allows us to model complex dependencies between the outputs. We illustrate the performance of our model on the task of video captioning, as well as a synthetic sequence de-noising task.
HinTel-AlignBench: A Framework and Benchmark for Hindi-Telugu with English-Aligned Samples
Chigrupaatii, Rishikant, Kanishka, Ponnada Sai Tulasi, Routhu, Lalit Chandra, Reddy, Martin Patel Sama Supratheek, Gupta, Divyam, Srikar, Dasari, Kuchimanchi, Krishna Teja, Misra, Rajiv, Tripathi, Rohun
With nearly 1.5 billion people and more than 120 major languages, India represents one of the most diverse regions in the world. As multilingual Vision-Language Models (VLMs) gain prominence, robust evaluation methodologies are essential to drive progress toward equitable AI for low-resource languages. Current multilingual VLM evaluations suffer from four major limitations: reliance on unverified auto-translations, narrow task/domain coverage, limited sample sizes, and lack of cultural and natively sourced Question-Answering (QA). To address these gaps, we present a scalable framework to evaluate VLMs in Indian languages and compare it with performance in English. Using the framework, we generate HinTel-AlignBench, a benchmark that draws from diverse sources in Hindi and Telugu with English-aligned samples. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a semi-automated dataset creation framework combining back-translation, filtering, and human verification; (2) the most comprehensive vision-language benchmark for Hindi and and Telugu, including adapted English datasets (VQAv2, RealWorldQA, CLEVR-Math) and native novel Indic datasets (JEE for STEM, VAANI for cultural grounding) with approximately 4,000 QA pairs per language; and (3) a detailed performance analysis of various State-of-the-Art (SOTA) open-weight and closed-source VLMs. We find a regression in performance for tasks in English versus in Indian languages for 4 out of 5 tasks across all the models, with an average regression of 8.3 points in Hindi and 5.5 points for Telugu. We categorize common failure modes to highlight concrete areas of improvement in multilingual multimodal understanding.