UF Gators Win AmericasNLP 2026 Cultural Image Captioning Task

The University of Florida Gators clinched victory at the AmericasNLP 2026 shared task focused on generating captions for cultural images in Indigenous languages. They utilized a two-step method that first crafted a caption in Spanish with Qwen2.5-VL, then translated it into the target language using retrieval-augmented many-shot prompting with Gemini 2.5 Flash. Their results showed remarkable improvements: 164.1% for Bribri, 131.7% for Guaraní, and 122.6% for Orizaba Nahuatl, compared to the baseline on the development set. In the test set, both Bribri and Orizaba Nahuatl saw gains of over 150%. The team emphasized that retrieval methods vary significantly by language, and synthetic data augmentation contributed around 28 chrF++ to Guaraní's results. They finished second out of five in human assessments.