Recently there has been a significant surge in multimodal learning in terms of both image-to-text and text-to-image generation. However, the success is typically limited to English, leaving other languages largely behind. Building a competitive counterpart in other languages is highly challenging due to the low-resource nature of non-English multimodal data (i.e., lack of large-scale, high-quality image-text data). In this work, we propose MPM, an effective training paradigm for training large multimodal models in low-resource languages. MPM demonstrates that Multilingual language models can Pivot zero-shot Multimodal learning across languages. Specifically, based on a strong multilingual large language model, multimodal models pretrained on English-only image-text data can well generalize to other languages in a (quasi)-zero-shot manner, even surpassing models trained on image-text data in native languages. Taking Chinese as a practice of MPM, we build large multimodal models VisCPM in image-to-text and text-to-image generation, which achieve state-of-the-art (open-source) performance in Chinese. To facilitate future research, we open-source codes and model weights at https://github.com/OpenBMB/VisCPM.

Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm has been successful for state-of-the-art performance in high-dimensional continuous control tasks. However, due to the complexity and randomness of the environment, DDPG tends to suffer from inefficient exploration and unstable training. In this work, we propose Self-Adaptive Double Bootstrapped DDPG (SOUP), an algorithm that extends DDPG to bootstrapped actor-critic architecture. SOUP improves the efficiency of exploration by multiple actor heads capturing more potential actions and multiple critic heads evaluating more reasonable Q-values collaboratively. The crux of double bootstrapped architecture is to tackle the fluctuations in performance, caused by multiple heads of spotty capacity varying throughout training. To alleviate the instability, a self-adaptive confidence mechanism is introduced to dynamically adjust the weights of bootstrapped heads and enhance the ensemble performance effectively and efficiently. We demonstrate that SOUP achieves faster learning by at least 45% while improving cumulative reward and stability substantially in comparison to vanilla DDPG on OpenAI Gym's MuJoCo environments.