arXiv:2608.22363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical visual question answering (VQA) is a crucial task in clinical AI, yet its evaluation has so far centered almost exclusively on English, limitin...
The paper examines how multilingual medical adaptation affects the internal representations of Whisper ASR models by performing layer‑wise encoder analysis. It compares several adaptation strategies—zero‑shot decoding, English‑only fine‑tuning, German‑only diagnostic fine‑tuning, two‑stage EN→EN+DE continuation, and direct EN+DE fine‑tuning—across different Whisper sizes, finding that fine‑tuning improves performance but the best model varies by setting. Layer‑wise results show that English medical fine‑tuning drives the main encoder shift, while multilingual continuation largely preserves the adapted representation space, with domain and language information remaining recoverable across layers. "whyItMatters":"The study provides insight into how multilingual medical adaptation reshapes Whisper’s internal representations, guiding the selection of model sizes and fine‑tuning strategies for improved MedASR performance."
arXiv:2606. 19266v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear.
The paper examines how multilingual medical adaptation affects the internal representations of Whisper ASR models. By comparing various fine‑tuning strategies—zero‑shot decoding, English‑only, German‑only, two‑stage EN→EN+DE, and direct EN+DE fine‑tuning—it shows that fine‑tuning significantly improves performance, with the best model varying by setting. Layer‑wise encoder analysis reveals that English medical fine‑tuning drives the main representation shift, while multilingual continuation largely preserves the adapted space, and that domain and language signals remain recoverable across layers.
arXiv:2607. 19243v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual fluency, their internal knowledge representations remain disproportionately biased toward high-resource languages.
AQL‑Lite is a framework that enables efficient adaptation of multilingual large language models to Modern Standard Arabic by combining a quality‑first data curation pipeline with a partial‑parameter continual pretraining recipe. The approach trains RS‑LoRA adapters, the last eight transformer blocks, and the embedding matrix using layer‑wise learning rates, achieving significant benchmark gains while reducing training time and resource usage. In large‑scale experiments, AQL‑Lite recovers most of the performance of full‑parameter continual pretraining and outperforms adapter‑only baselines, demonstrating its practicality for Arabic LLM development.
The paper introduces AyurParam-2.9B, a bilingual language model fine‑tuned for Ayurveda using a curated dataset of classical texts and clinical guidance in English and Hindi. It outperforms other open‑source instruction‑tuned models of similar size on the BhashaBench‑Ayur benchmark and rivals larger models in performance. The work demonstrates that authentic domain adaptation and high‑quality supervision are essential for reliable, culturally congruent AI in specialized medical fields.
Nuha‑Speech is a new initiative aimed at creating general‑purpose Arabic speech‑large language models (speech‑LLMs). It includes the construction of a large Arabic Speech Question‑Answering corpus with over 1.5 million samples for instruction tuning, supervised fine‑tuning of Qwen‑Omni model variants at various scales, and a systematic evaluation framework with diverse tasks and tailored metrics. The project seeks to establish foundational infrastructure for Arabic speech‑LLMs amid limited Arabic speech resources.
arXiv:2607. 20056v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) in Arabic must recover both explicitly stated aspects and implicit aspects that are never named in the text.
The study investigates how exposing large language models to Arabic translations of English benchmark tasks can hide data contamination from standard English-only detection methods. By testing four instruction-tuned models with increasing Arabic exposure, the authors find that traditional probes like TS-Guessing and Min-K%++ fail to detect contamination, yet English performance still improves. They propose a new Translation-Aware Contamination Detection (TACD) method that uses cross-lingual consistency and choice reordering to reveal contamination effects that are otherwise invisible to English-only diagnostics.
E-CONAN introduces Arabic textual entailment and natural inference benchmarks comprising two datasets: E-CONAN-2 (2-way RTE) and E-CONAN-3 (3-way NLI). The datasets are built from automatically-translated pairs, human-validated machine translations, hand-crafted pairs from Arabic teaching books, and rumor-containing news headlines. The authors evaluated nine multilingual pretrained models and five large language models on these benchmarks, demonstrating that E-CONAN offers a more diverse and robust assessment than existing datasets like XNLI and ArNLI.
arXiv:2606. 19346v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning seven large language models (4B--671B parameters) on Arabic and evaluating zero-shot reading comprehension on Semitic languages and non-Semitic controls.