To advance the neural decoding of Portuguese, in this paper we present a fully open Transformer-based, instruction-tuned decoder model that sets a new state of the art in this respect. To develop this decoder, which we named Gervásio PT*, a strong LLaMA 2 7B model was used as a starting point, and its further improvement through additional training was done over language resources that include new instruction data sets of Portuguese prepared for this purpose, which are also contributed in this paper. All versions of Gervásio are open source and distributed for free under an open license, including for either research or commercial usage, and can be run on consumer-grade hardware, thus seeking to contribute to the advancement of research and innovation in language technology for Portuguese.

To foster the neural encoding of Portuguese, this paper contributes foundation encoder models that represent an expansion of the still very scarce ecosystem of large language models specifically developed for this language that are fully open, in the sense that they are open source and openly distributed for free under an open license for any purpose, thus including research and commercial usages. Like most languages other than English, Portuguese is low-resourced in terms of these foundational language resources, there being the inaugural 900 million parameter Albertina and 335 million Bertimbau. Taking this couple of models as an inaugural set, we present the extension of the ecosystem of state-of-the-art open encoders for Portuguese with a larger, top performance-driven model with 1.5 billion parameters, and a smaller, efficiency-driven model with 100 million parameters. While achieving this primary goal, further results that are relevant for this ecosystem were obtained as well, namely new datasets for Portuguese based on the SuperGLUE benchmark, which we also distribute openly.

Cross-modal language and image processing is envisaged as a way to improve language understanding by resorting to visual grounding, but only recently, with the emergence of neural architectures specifically tailored to cope with both modalities, has it attracted increased attention and obtained promising results. In this paper we address a cross-modal task of language-driven image design, in particular the task of altering a given image on the basis of language instructions. We also avoid the need for a specifically tailored architecture and resort instead to a general purpose model in the Transformer family. Experiments with the resulting tool, LX-DRIM, show very encouraging results, confirming the viability of the approach for language-driven image design while keeping it affordable in terms of compute and data.