mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Large Multimodal Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Survey

arXiv 2502.05568 ↗First posted 8 Feb 2025cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 4

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → MLLM training and visual instruction tuning

Abstract (arXiv)

In this survey, we systematically analyze techniques used to adapt large multimodal models (LMMs) for low-resource (LR) languages, examining approaches ranging from visual enhancement and data creation to cross-modal transfer and fusion strategies. Through a comprehensive analysis of 117 studies across 96 LR languages, we identify key patterns in how researchers tackle the challenges of limited data and computational resources. We categorize works into resource-oriented and method-oriented contributions, further dividing contributions into relevant sub-categories. We compare method-oriented contributions in terms of performance and efficiency, discussing benefits and limitations of representative studies. We find that visual information often serves as a crucial bridge for improving model performance in LR settings, though significant challenges remain in areas such as hallucination mitigation and computational efficiency. In summary, we provide researchers with a clear understanding of current approaches and remaining challenges in making LMMs more accessible to speakers of LR (understudied) languages. We complement our survey with an open-source repository available at: https://github.com/marianlupascu/LMM4LRL-Survey.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 55 of its 130 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2025.

Builds on

55 of 130 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Vintern-1B: An Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model for Vietnamese22 Aug
  2. 2024Dallah: A Dialect-Aware Multimodal Large Language Model for Arabic25 Jul
  3. 2024LaVy: Vietnamese Multimodal Large Language Model11 Apr
  4. 2024Peacock: A Family of Arabic Multimodal Large Language Models and Benchmarks1 Mar
  5. 2024Multimodal Instruction Tuning with Conditional Mixture of LoRA24 Feb
  6. 2023A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models23 Jun

Other references · 49

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37 more
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  5. 2021A Good Prompt Is Worth Millions of Parameters: Low-resource Prompt-based Learning for Vision-Language Modelscited by 101
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 3.

4 papers.

  1. 2025Parallel Corpora for Machine Translation in Low-resource Indic Languages: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 4
  2. 2026Multilingual and Multimodal LLMs in the Wild: Building for Low-Resource Languagescited by 0
  3. 2026Few-Medoids: An Embarrassingly Simple Coreset Selection Method for Few-Shot Knowledge Distillationcited by 0
  4. 2026Language Models for Portuguese: A Systematic Mapping Studycited by 0

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