@inproceedings{geigle-etal-2024-babel,
    title = "Babel-{I}mage{N}et: Massively Multilingual Evaluation of Vision-and-Language Representations",
    author = "Geigle, Gregor  and
      Timofte, Radu  and
      Glava{\v{s}}, Goran",
    editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Srikumar, Vivek",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2024.acl-long.277/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.277",
    pages = "5064--5084",
    abstract = "Vision-and-language (VL) models with separate encoders for each modality (e.g., CLIP) have become the go-to models for zero-shot image classification and image-text retrieval. They are, however, mostly evaluated in English as multilingual benchmarks are limited in availability. We introduce Babel-ImageNet, a massively multilingual benchmark that offers (partial) translations of ImageNet labels to 100 languages, built without machine translation or manual annotation. We instead automatically obtain reliable translations by linking them {--} via shared WordNet synsets {--} to BabelNet, a massively multilingual lexico-semantic network. We evaluate 11 public multilingual CLIP models on zero-shot image classification (ZS-IC) on our benchmark, demonstrating a significant gap between English ImageNet performance and that of high-resource languages (e.g., German or Chinese), and an even bigger gap for low-resource languages (e.g., Sinhala or Lao). Crucially, we show that the models' ZS-IC performance highly correlates with their performance in image-text retrieval, validating the use of Babel-imageNet to evaluate multilingual models for the vast majority of languages without gold image-text data. Finally, we show that the performance of multilingual CLIP can be drastically improved for low-resource languages with parameter-efficient language-specific training. We make our code and data publicly available: \url{https://github.com/gregor-ge/Babel-ImageNet}"
}