Manacá-1B is a 1.72‑billion‑parameter, open decoder‑only language model trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese, released with a fully containerized, reproducible training pipeline and complete logs. The authors evaluate it against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks, reporting standard errors and paired significance tests, and find that Manacá-1B outperforms smaller models on LAMBADA‑PT while remaining competitive on commonsense completion. They also uncover a tokenizer‑related evaluation pitfall that can drastically lower accuracy and provide a simple fix, releasing all code, logs, and corrected tokenizer for full reproducibility.
Brazilian Portuguese remains under-served by open language models, and the few that exist are difficult to reproduce and are often compared without measures of uncertainty. We release Manacá-1B, an op...
arXiv:2607. 04581v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text embeddings for Portuguese have no dedicated benchmark: evaluation rests on translated corpora such as English MS MARCO or on thin multilingual coverage, with native tasks scattered and unconsolidated.
arXiv:2512. 20757v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tokenizers provide the fundamental basis through which text is represented and processed by language models (LMs).
arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.
arXiv:2607. 04581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text embeddings for Portuguese have no dedicated benchmark: evaluation rests on translated corpora such as English MS MARCO or on thin multilingual coverage, with native tasks scattered and unconsolidated.
arXiv:2607. 04071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Portuguese remains underrepresented in text embedding evaluation, despite being one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
TokEval is a tokenizer evaluation suite that introduces metrics beyond traditional fertility and compression rate, capturing linguistically and structurally meaningful properties such as UTF‑8 character boundary integrity and digit place‑value alignment for mathematics. The authors validate these metrics by pretraining language models with varied tokenizers and measuring downstream performance on bits‑per‑byte and benchmarks covering linguistic understanding, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. Their results show that information‑theoretic metrics predict language modeling performance, while structure‑sensitive metrics correlate with task accuracy, suggesting TokEval can guide tokenizer selection more principledly.
TokEval is a tokenizer evaluation suite that introduces metrics beyond traditional fertility and compression rate, capturing linguistically and structurally meaningful properties such as UTF-8 character boundary integrity and digit place-value alignment for mathematics. The authors validate these metrics by conducting controlled language model pretraining experiments that vary tokenizer training data, pretokenization strategy, and training algorithm, then evaluate the models on bits-per-byte and benchmarks covering linguistic understanding, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. Results show that information-theoretic metrics predict language modeling performance, while structure-sensitive metrics correlate with task accuracy, suggesting TokEval can guide tokenizer selection more principledly.
SimLens is a training‑free decoder that improves early‑layer predictions in large language models by keeping only the start token and a candidate answer token and performing a lightweight continuation through the remaining layers. It outperforms direct linear readouts, yielding higher accuracy on tasks such as ARC, BoolQ, and HeadQA with LLaMA‑7B and Vicuna‑7B. The method is extended to Linear SimLens for confidence estimation and combined into SimExit, a hybrid early‑exit mechanism that achieves significant speedups while maintaining accuracy.
arXiv:2606. 28999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Encoders have become the state of the art for multiple NLP tasks, especially those requiring deep contextual understanding.
arXiv:2607. 15232v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A tokenizer fixed at the start of pre-training allocates vocabulary in proportion to the pre-training corpus, reflecting the deployment priorities at that time.
We present DONDO, a family of open, permissively licensed automatic speech recognition (ASR) base models for African languages, built on the w2v-BERT 2. 0 self-supervised speech encoder.