Memory Reviving, Continuing Learning and Beyond: Evaluation of Pre-trained Encoders and Decoders for Multimodal Machine Translation

Abstract: Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) aims to improve translation quality by leveraging auxiliary modalities such as images alongside textual input. While recent advances in large-scale pre-trained language and vision models have significantly benefited unimodal natural language processing tasks, their effectiveness and role in MMT remain underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic study on the impact of pre-trained encoders and decoders in multimodal translation models. Specifically, we analyze how different training strategies, from training from scratch to using pre-trained and partially frozen components, affect translation performance under a unified MMT framework. Experiments are carried out on the Multi30K and CoMMuTE dataset across English-German and English-French translation tasks. Our results reveal that pre-training plays a crucial yet asymmetrical role in multimodal settings: pre-trained decoders consistently yield more fluent and accurate outputs, while pre-trained encoders show varied effects depending on the quality of visual-text alignment. Furthermore, we provide insights into the interplay between modality fusion and pre-trained components, offering guidance for future architecture design in multimodal translation systems.