Violet: A Vision-Language Model for Arabic Image Captioning with Gemini Decoder
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Although image captioning has a vast array of applications, it has not reached its full potential in languages other than English. Arabic, for instance, although the native language of more than 400 million people, remains largely underrepresented in this area. This is due to the lack of labeled data and powerful Arabic generative models. We alleviate this issue by presenting a novel vision-language model dedicated to Arabic, dubbed textitViolet. Our model is based on a vision encoder and a Gemini text decoder that maintains generation fluency while allowing fusion between the vision and language components. To train our model, we introduce a new method for automatically acquiring data from available English datasets. We also manually prepare a new dataset for evaluation. textitViolet performs sizeably better than our baselines on all of our evaluation datasets. For example, it reaches a CIDEr score of 61.2 on our manually annotated dataset and achieves an improvement of 13 points on Flickr8k.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 24 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2023.
Builds on
24 of 42 references.
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12 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 4; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
7 papers.
- 2024Peacock: A Family of Arabic Multimodal Large Language Models and Benchmarkscited by 32
- 2024Dallah: A Dialect-Aware Multimodal Large Language Model for Arabiccited by 16
- 2025JEEM: Vision-Language Understanding in Four Arabic Dialectscited by 7
- 2026Anthropogenic Regional Adaptation in Multimodal Vision-Language Modelcited by 2
- 2025Multimodal Arabic Captioning with Interpretable Visual Concept Integrationcited by 1
- 2024Image captioning in different languagescited by 0
- 2024Surveying the Landscape of Image Captioning Evaluation: A Comprehensive Taxonomy, Trends and Metrics Analysiscited by 0
- 2026Anthropogenic Regional Adaptation in Multimodal Vision-Language Model13 Apr 2026
- 2025Multimodal Arabic Captioning with Interpretable Visual Concept Integration29 Sep 2025
- 2025JEEM: Vision-Language Understanding in Four Arabic Dialects27 Mar 2025
- 2024Surveying the Landscape of Image Captioning Evaluation: A Comprehensive Taxonomy, Trends and Metrics Analysis9 Aug 2024
- 2024Dallah: A Dialect-Aware Multimodal Large Language Model for Arabic25 Jul 2024
- 2024Image captioning in different languages31 May 2024
- 2024Peacock: A Family of Arabic Multimodal Large Language Models and Benchmarks1 Mar 2024
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- 2025Baseer: A Vision-Language Model for Arabic Document-to-Markdown OCR
- 2025AIN: The Arabic INclusive Large Multimodal Model
- 2025COCO-Urdu: A Large-Scale Urdu Image-Caption Dataset with Multimodal Quality Estimation
- 2026ImageEval 2026: Culturally Grounded Arabic Multimodal Evaluation
- 2024Exploring the Frontier of Vision-Language Models: A Survey of Current Methodologies and Future Directions
- 2024SynthVLM: Towards High-Quality and Efficient Synthesis of Image-Caption Datasets for Vision-Language Models