Ananya Sahu

Alejandro R. Salamanca, Diana Abagyan, Daniel D'souza et al. · microsoft-research

Tiny Aya redefines what a small multilingual language model can achieve. Trained on 70 languages and refined through region-aware posttraining, it delivers state-of-the-art in translation quality, strong multilingual understanding, and high-quality target-language generation, all with just 3.35B parameters. The release includes a pretrained foundation model, a globally balanced instruction-tuned variant, and three region-specialized models targeting languages from Africa, South Asia, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and West Asia. This report details the training strategy, data composition, and comprehensive evaluation framework behind Tiny Aya, and presents an alternative scaling path for multilingual AI: one centered on efficiency, balanced performance across languages, and practical deployment.

Ananya Sahu, Amith Ananthram, Kathleen McKeown

Understanding another person's creative output requires a shared language of association. However, when training vision-language models such as CLIP, we rely on web-scraped datasets containing short, predominantly literal, alt-text. In this work, we introduce a method for mining contextualized associations for salient visual elements in an image that can scale to any unlabeled dataset. Given an image, we can use these mined associations to generate high quality creative captions at increasing degrees of abstraction. With our method, we produce a new dataset of visual associations and 1.7m creative captions for the images in MSCOCO. Human evaluation confirms that these captions remain visually grounded while exhibiting recognizably increasing abstraction. Moreover, fine-tuning a visual encoder on this dataset yields meaningful improvements in zero-shot image-text retrieval in two creative domains: poetry and metaphor visualization. We release our dataset, our generation code and our models for use by the broader community.