Scaling Multilingual Pretraining of Pixel Language Models

Ilker Kesen, Jenny Kunz, Kasra Malihi, Desmond Elliott

Pixel language models process text as rendered images instead of a finite vocabulary, which gives them strong cross-lingual transfer abilities. However, not much is known about how these abilities are influenced by larger-scale pretraining. In this paper, we train a family of MPIXEL models along three axes of variation: more languages, more scripts, and larger model capacity under fixed per-language compute. In evaluations on five tasks covering 83 languages, we find that scaling acts locally: each axis improves the added languages and scripts, while increased capacity mitigates the curse of multilinguality from pretraining on more languages. Transfer to unseen scripts improves with multilingual pretraining, but does not further improve with scaling. On typologically distant low-resource languages, our models outperform subword and character-level baselines across many writing systems. We also show that larger pixel models reserve more layers for visual processing, and that cross-lingual alignment weakens as more languages are added. Overall, our findings characterize how multilingual scaling improves pixel language models.