arXiv Machine Learning

No Optimal Language Set Exists for Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Insights from a Linguistically-Informed Study

arXiv:2410. 07809v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multilingual instruction tuning (MIT) is challenged by the curse of multilinguality, data scarcity, and high computational cost.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

LuxIT: A Luxembourgish Instruction Tuning Dataset from Monolingual Seed Data

LuxIT is a monolingual instruction‑tuning dataset for Luxembourgish, created by synthesizing instruction‑answer pairs from native texts using the DeepSeek‑R1‑0528 model and a quality‑assurance LLM‑as‑judge process. The resulting 227,507 high‑quality pairs were used to fine‑tune 14 LLMs (≤15 B parameters), yielding an average accuracy increase of +5.37 percentage points on standardized Luxembourgish proficiency exams and improvements in macro‑averaged F1 on nine of the fourteen downstream NLP tasks. These findings demonstrate that synthetic monolingual data can effectively enhance LLM performance in low‑resource languages and reveal the complex relationship between exam performance and practical NLP gains.

By Julian Valline, Cedric Lothritz, Siwen Guo, Jordi Cabot
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

MultiSynt/MT: Trillion-Token Multi-Parallel Pre-Training Data Translated Across 36 Languages

arXiv:2607.00890v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synth...

By Maximilian Idahl, J\"org Tiedemann, Sampo Pyysalo, David Salinas, Tomasz Galica, Shenbin Qian, Tudor Nicolae Mateiu, Zihao Li, Anna Lokrantz, Fedor Vitiugin, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Jenna Kanerva, Filip Ginter, Matthias Lindemann, Tim Isbister, Birger Moell, Jonas Lindh, Jan Haji\v{c}, Jenia Jitsev, Andrey Kutuzov, Stephan Oepen, Gema Ram\'irez-S\'anchez
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

EuroAlpaca: Task-Preserving Localisation of Instruction Data for European Languages

EuroAlpaca presents a task‑preserving localisation pipeline that translates English instruction‑tuning data into 50 European languages while maintaining task‑critical constraints. The method uses field‑wise machine translation or reconstructs task‑equivalent target‑language instances, followed by validation of coherence and consistency. Experiments show that EuroAlpaca improves instruction‑following accuracy by 12.9% over a baseline and outperforms direct translation on ROUGE‑L and F‑BERT metrics.

By Aleix Sant, Jordi Luque, Carlos Escolano
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Latent Mechanisms of Language Control in Multilingual Language Models

The paper investigates how multilingual large language models can unintentionally switch languages during generation. It compares three techniques—ValSel, FreqSel, and AnnSel—for pinpointing latent variables that control language choice in cross‑layer transcoders. Using new multilingual benchmarks and targeted interventions on Gemma‑2‑2B and Qwen3‑4B, the study finds all methods can steer output language, with FreqSel performing best and AnnSel providing interpretable selections via explicit annotations.

By Ryo Mitsuhashi, Sabri Boughorbel, Majd Hawasly
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Apples to Apples? Towards Comparable Crosslingual Language Model Evaluation

The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.

By Xiulin Yang, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Catherine Arnett
arXiv AI
Sep 3

CroCo: Cross-Lingual Contrastive Preference Tuning on Self-Generations

CroCo introduces cross‑lingual contrastive preference tuning on self‑generations, extending prior English‑only methods to 14 high‑ and low‑resource languages. A reward model trained solely on English preferences, applied to a multilingual base, yields effective within‑language rankings and improves performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings without catastrophic forgetting. The approach requires on‑policy data; off‑policy responses and online preference optimization offer limited gains, yet on structured tasks CroCo matches or surpasses the base model in most languages, and on open‑ended generation it wins 28/30 judge evaluations across 15 languages.

By Mike Zhang, Ali Basirat, Desmond Elliott
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

In-context Learning vs. Instruction Tuning: The Case of Small and Multilingual Language Models

The paper investigates whether in‑context learning (ICL) can replace instruction tuning for multilingual language models, especially as model size varies. It highlights the difficulty of obtaining high‑quality instruction data in multilingual settings and compares the performance of ICL versus instruction‑tuned models. The findings show that a performance gap persists between the two approaches, suggesting the need for further research to close it.

By David Ponce, Thierry Etchegoyhen