Papers › Amharic LLaMA and LLaVA: Multimodal LLMs for Low Resource Languages

Amharic LLaMA and LLaVA: Multimodal LLMs for Low Resource Languages

11 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.06354archive 2025-07-28

Michael Andersland

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA have shown incredible proficiency at natural language processing tasks and have even begun to excel at tasks across other modalities such as vision and audio. Despite their success, LLMs often struggle to perform well on low-resource languages because there is so little training data available. This shortcoming is especially prevalent with open source models. In this work, we explore training LLaMA-2 to speak Amharic, a language which is spoken by over 50 million people world wide, but has orders of magnitude less data available than languages like English. We employ methods previously used for training LLMs on other languages with data scarcity, and use open source translation models to perform data augmentation and grow our dataset from millions of tokens to billions. We further enhance the capabilities of our model by connecting an image encoder and training on a translated visual instruction tuning dataset in the same manner as LLaVA, resulting in a multimodal Amharic LLM that can understand images along with text. We introduce an Amharic version of a popular benchmarking dataset to evaluate our work. Our models and dataset are open sourced and available on GitHub.

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iocuydi/amharic-llama-llava officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Benchmarking Data Augmentation

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Absolute Position Encodings Adam Attention BPE Dense Connections Dropout GPT-4 Label Smoothing Layer Normalization Linear Layer Multi-Head Attention Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer Residual Connection Softmax Transformer

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