A national language model offers a linguistic community its own instrument for measuring what its citizens say and value. Portugal's AMALIA, a publicly funded 9B-parameter model for European Portuguese, appears competitive on agreement alone: asked to code the moral foundation of authority, it agrees with trained human coders to within six F1 points of open models eight to thirteen times its size.
arXiv:2607. 08731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: National language models are becoming publicly funded epistemic infrastructure.
By Manuel Pita
When a tool-using agent is given the same task in a different language, does it still take the same steps? Multilingual evaluation rarely asks: it compares final answers and discards the actions.
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.
By Bruno Leonardo Santos Menezes, Carlos Leonardo Souza Cardoso, Fabio Andre Machado Porto
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.
By Tardelli Ronan Coelho Stekel
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.
By Tardelli Ronan Coelho Stekel
The paper demonstrates that large language model (LLM) evaluators, whether reward‑model based or prompted LLM‑as‑a‑Judge, exhibit significant language bias in multilingual settings. Experiments with semantically identical instruction‑response pairs across 23 languages reveal that lower‑resource languages receive higher scores, a bias that persists across eight open‑weight evaluators and is not detectable by standard pairwise accuracy metrics. The authors link the bias to model uncertainty and language identity, showing it cannot be explained by content difficulty alone.
By Ej Zhou, Lucas Resck, Zheng Hui, Anna Korhonen
arXiv:2608. 14896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models work well on English and behave in poorly understood ways on languages typologically far from it.
By Florian Braun
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:2606. 30116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pairwise preference data is widely used for training and evaluating language models (e.
By Eleanor Clifford, Michael Amir, Arduin Findeis, Aaron Zhao, Robert Mullins
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.
By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
arXiv:2609.25447v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study what LLMs do when a user applies pressure in an uncomfortable situation: a user insists, begs, flatters or grieves, and the model gives up a c...
By Tapan Parikh