Retrieval-Augmented Long-Context Translation for Cultural Image Captioning: Gators submission for AmericasNLP 2026 shared task
We present the University of Florida Gators submission to the AmericasNLP 2026 shared task on cultural image captioning for Indigenous languages. Our two-stage pipeline generates a Spanish intermediate caption with Qwen2.5-VL, then produces the target-language caption using retrieval-augmented many-shot prompting with Gemini 2.5 Flash. We achieve 164.1%, 131.7%, and 122.6% improvements over the shared task baseline for Bribri, Guaraní, and Orizaba Nahuatl captioning, respectively, in our dev set evaluation and maintain >150% improvements for the Bribri and Orizaba Nahuatl languages in the test set evaluation. We find retrieval is highly language-dependent, beneficial only for large, in-do...
| Authors | Aashish Dhawan, Christopher Driggers-Ellis, Dzmitry Kasinets et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 May 2026 |
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