12.9CLSep 23, 2024
Brotherhood at WMT 2024: Leveraging LLM-Generated Contextual Conversations for Cross-Lingual Image CaptioningSiddharth Betala, Ishan Chokshi
In this paper, we describe our system under the team name Brotherhood for the English-to-Lowres Multi-Modal Translation Task. We participate in the multi-modal translation tasks for English-Hindi, English-Hausa, English-Bengali, and English-Malayalam language pairs. We present a method leveraging multi-modal Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, to enhance cross-lingual image captioning without traditional training or fine-tuning. Our approach utilizes instruction-tuned prompting to generate rich, contextual conversations about cropped images, using their English captions as additional context. These synthetic conversations are then translated into the target languages. Finally, we employ a weighted prompting strategy, balancing the original English caption with the translated conversation to generate captions in the target language. This method achieved competitive results, scoring 37.90 BLEU on the English-Hindi Challenge Set and ranking first and second for English-Hausa on the Challenge and Evaluation Leaderboards, respectively. We conduct additional experiments on a subset of 250 images, exploring the trade-offs between BLEU scores and semantic similarity across various weighting schemes.
4.9CLNov 10, 2025
A Picture is Worth a Thousand (Correct) Captions: A Vision-Guided Judge-Corrector System for Multimodal Machine TranslationSiddharth Betala, Kushan Raj, Vipul Betala et al.
In this paper, we describe our system under the team name BLEU Monday for the English-to-Indic Multimodal Translation Task at WAT 2025. We participate in the text-only translation tasks for English-Hindi, English-Bengali, English-Malayalam, and English-Odia language pairs. We present a two-stage approach that addresses quality issues in the training data through automated error detection and correction, followed by parameter-efficient model fine-tuning. Our methodology introduces a vision-augmented judge-corrector pipeline that leverages multimodal language models to systematically identify and correct translation errors in the training data. The judge component classifies translations into three categories: correct, visually ambiguous (requiring image context), or mistranslated (poor translation quality). Identified errors are routed to specialized correctors: GPT-4o-mini regenerates captions requiring visual disambiguation, while IndicTrans2 retranslates cases with pure translation quality issues. This automated pipeline processes 28,928 training examples across four languages, correcting an average of 17.1% of captions per language. We then apply Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the IndicTrans2 en-indic 200M distilled model on both original and corrected datasets. Training on corrected data yields consistent improvements, with BLEU score gains of +1.30 for English-Bengali on the evaluation set (42.00 -> 43.30) and +0.70 on the challenge set (44.90 -> 45.60), +0.60 for English-Odia on the evaluation set (41.00 -> 41.60), and +0.10 for English-Hindi on the challenge set (53.90 -> 54.00).