Text · Speech · Vision Low-resource focus Hands-on recipes

Multilingual and Multimodal LLMs in the Wild

Build inclusive tri-modal systems that see, hear, and read for low-resource languages and dialects. We cover BLIP-2, LLaVA, KOSMOS-1, PaLM-E, PALO, Maya, SeamlessM4T, and AudioPaLM—plus efficient PEFT/adapters/MoE, culture-aware benchmarks, and speech→text→LLM pipelines.

View outline Meet the speakers Reading list

Efficient multimodality

Adapter stacks, LoRA/QLoRA, quantization, and MoE routing for compact multilingual VLMs.

Data & evaluation

Low-cost data creation, OCR/ASR bootstraps, and culture-aware benchmarks like xGQA, MaRVL, and HaVQA.

Speech in the loop

Practical speech→text→LLM pipelines, cascaded vs. unified speech–text models, and robustness checks.

Hands-on resources

Slides, lab notebooks, and checklists for rapid replication across low-resource settings.

Venue

Conference venue and room details will be posted once the schedule is finalized.

Date

Date: 12 May 2026
Time: 14:00-18:00 CET
Coffee break: 16:00-16:30 CET

Speakers

Firoj Alam, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Enamul Hoque is an Associate Professor at York University.

Please check the bio for each speaker

Citation

Please cite the tutorial as:

Alam, Firoj, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, and Enamul Hoque Prince. 2026. “Multilingual and Multimodal LLMs in the Wild: Building for Low-Resource Languages.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.17152. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17152.

Bib Entry


@article{alam2026multilingualmultimodalllmswild,
  title={Multilingual and Multimodal LLMs in the Wild: Building for Low-Resource Languages},
  author={Alam, Firoj and Chowdhury, Shammur Absar and Prince, Enamul Hoque},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.17152},
  year={2026},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17152}
}

Table of Content

Outline and schedule
Slides and lab links will appear here as they are posted.

Reading List

Reading list and references