@inproceedings{chen-etal-2023-mclip,
    title = "m{CLIP}: Multilingual {CLIP} via Cross-lingual Transfer",
    author = "Chen, Guanhua  and
      Hou, Lu  and
      Chen, Yun  and
      Dai, Wenliang  and
      Shang, Lifeng  and
      Jiang, Xin  and
      Liu, Qun  and
      Pan, Jia  and
      Wang, Wenping",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.728",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.728",
    pages = "13028--13043",
    abstract = "Large-scale vision-language pretrained (VLP) models like CLIP have shown remarkable performance on various downstream cross-modal tasks. However, they are usually biased towards English due to the lack of sufficient non-English image-text pairs. Existing multilingual VLP methods often learn retrieval-inefficient single-stream models by translation-augmented non-English image-text pairs. In this paper, we introduce mCLIP, a retrieval-efficient dual-stream multilingual VLP model, trained by aligning the CLIP model and a Multilingual Text Encoder (MTE) through a novel Triangle Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation (TriKD) method. It is parameter-efficient as only two light projectors on the top of them are updated during distillation. Furthermore, to enhance the token- and sentence-level multilingual representation of the MTE, we propose to train it with machine translation and contrastive learning jointly before the TriKD to provide a better initialization. Empirical results show that mCLIP achieves new state-of-the-art performance for both zero-shot and finetuned multilingual image-text retrieval task.",
}

Large-scale vision-language pretrained (VLP) models like CLIP have shown remarkable performance on various downstream cross-modal tasks. However, they are usually biased towards English due to the lack of sufficient non-English image-text pairs. Existing multilingual VLP methods often learn retrieval-inefficient single-stream models by translation-augmented non-English image-text pairs. In this paper, we introduce mCLIP, a retrieval-efficient dual-stream multilingual VLP model, trained by aligning the CLIP model and a Multilingual Text Encoder (MTE) through a novel Triangle Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation (TriKD) method. It is parameter-efficient as only two light projectors on the top of them are updated during distillation. Furthermore, to enhance the token- and sentence-level multilingual representation of the MTE, we propose to train it with machine translation and contrastive learning jointly before the TriKD to provide a better initialization. Empirical results show that mCLIP achieves new state-of-the-art performance for both zero-shot and finetuned multilingual image-text retrieval task.
Chen, Guanhua Hou, Lu Chen, Yun Dai, Wenliang Shang, Lifeng Jiang, Xin Liu, Qun Pan, Jia Wang, Wenping
mCLIP: Multilingual CLIP via Cross-lingual Transfer