Kaleidoscope: In-language Exams for Massively Multilingual Vision Evaluation

The evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs) has mainly relied on English-language benchmarks, leaving significant gaps in both multilingual and multicultural coverage. While multilingual benchmarks have expanded, both in size and languages, many rely on translations of English datasets, failing to capture cultural nuances. In this work, we propose Kaleidoscope, as the most comprehensive exam benchmark to date for the multilingual evaluation of vision-language models. Kaleidoscope is a large-scale, in-language multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs across diverse languages and visual inputs. Kaleidoscope covers 18 languages and 14 different subjects, amounting to a total of 20,911 multiple-choice questions. Built through an open science collaboration with a diverse group of researchers worldwide, Kaleidoscope ensures linguistic and cultural authenticity. We evaluate top-performing multilingual vision-language models and find that they perform poorly on low-resource languages and in complex multimodal scenarios. Our results highlight the need for progress on culturally inclusive multimodal evaluation frameworks.

Improved Few-Shot Image Classification Through Multiple-Choice Questions

Through a simple multiple choice language prompt a VQA model can operate as a zero-shot image classifier, producing a classification label. Compared to typical image encoders, VQA models offer an advantage: VQA-produced image embeddings can be infused with the most relevant visual information through tailored language prompts. Nevertheless, for most tasks, zero-shot VQA performance is lacking, either because of unfamiliar category names, or dissimilar pre-training data and test data distributions. We propose a simple method to boost VQA performance for image classification using only a handful of labeled examples and a multiple-choice question. This few-shot method is training-free and maintains the dynamic and flexible advantages of the VQA model. Rather than relying on the final language output, our approach uses multiple-choice questions to extract prompt-specific latent representations, which are enriched with relevant visual information. These representations are combined to create a final overall image embedding, which is decoded via reference to latent class prototypes constructed from the few labeled examples. We demonstrate this method outperforms both pure visual encoders and zero-shot VQA baselines to achieve impressive performance on common few-shot tasks including MiniImageNet, Caltech-UCSD Birds, and CIFAR-100. Finally, we show our approach does particularly well in settings with numerous diverse visual attributes such as the fabric, article-style, texture, and view of different articles of clothing, where other few-shot approaches struggle, as we can tailor our image representations only on the semantic features of interest.