Omnilingual SONAR: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Sentence Embeddings Bridging Massively Multilingual Text and Speech
Cross-lingual sentence encoders typically cover only a few hundred languages and often trade downstream quality for stronger alignment, limiting their adoption. We introduce OmniSONAR, a new family of omnilingual, cross-lingual and cross-modal sentence embedding models that natively embed text, speech, code, and mathematical expressions in a single semantic space, while delivering state-of-the-art downstream performance at the scale of thousands of languages, from high-resource to extremely low-resource varieties. To reach this scale without representation collapse, we use progressive training. We first learn a strong foundational space for 200 languages with an LLM-initialized encoder-de...
| Authors | Omnilingual SONAR Team, João Maria Janeiro, Pere-Lluís Huguet Cabot et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 June 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.