Synthesizing Olfactory Understanding: Multimodal Language Models for Image–Text Smell Matching

Olfactory information, crucial for human perception, is often underrepresented compared to visual and textual data. This work explores methods for understanding smell descriptions within a multimodal context, where scent information is conveyed indirectly through text and images. We address the challenges of the Multimodal Understanding of Smells in Texts and Images (MUSTI) task by proposing novel approaches that leverage language-specific models and state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MM-LLMs). Our core contribution is a multimodal framework using language-specific encoders for text and image data. This allows for a joint embedding space that explores the semantic symmetry between smells, texts, and images to identify olfactory-related connections shared across the modalities. While ensemble learning with language-specific models achieved good performance, MM-LLMs demonstrated exceptional potential. Fine-tuning a quantized version of the Qwen-VL-Chat model achieved a state-of-the-art macro F1-score of 0.7618 on the MUSTI task. This highlights the effectiveness of MM-LLMs in capturing task requirements and adapting to specific formats.