We introduce Dango, a 1. 8B-parameter large language model designed for controlled studies of L1-to-L2 (Japanese-to-English) transfer in second language acquisition (SLA).
arXiv:2609.22633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bilingual language models (LMs) offer a controlled setting for studying how training conditions shape second-language (L2) behaviour, but prior work ty...
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.
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...
The study compares an English-only and a bilingual decoder-only model, each 310 M parameters, trained on eight diverse languages while controlling for English exposure, compute, and document overlap. After aligning on shared English vocabulary, the authors find that token embeddings appear similar, but the deeper hidden states used for prediction diverge across models. This hidden‑state mismatch grows through middle transformer layers and persists despite controls, indicating that contextual processing differs between the models. "whyItMatters":"The findings show that embedding alignment can conceal significant internal representation differences, which is crucial for any downstream work that assumes aligned multilingual models are interchangeable."
arXiv:2608. 07629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models such as NLLB-200 cover 200 languages but leave thousands unsupported, including most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon.
arXiv:2510. 15551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus.
The paper investigates whether training small decoder-only transformers on code‑switched text can induce cross‑lingual alignment. Using two 100‑million‑word multilingual corpora—one a mix of English, Dutch, and Chinese BabyBabelLM data, and another generated by inserting word‑ and sentence‑level code‑switching via an LLM—the authors find that code‑switched training aligns representations of parallel text, especially across different scripts, and that this alignment persists when later training on monolingual documents. A curriculum that progresses from word‑level code‑switching to sentence‑level code‑switching and finally to monolingual data yields models that outperform baselines on the BabyLM evaluation suite, demonstrating that code‑switching curriculum learning is an effective data augmentation strategy for multilingual pretraining.
Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synthetic parallel corpus with approximately 4.
Large language models are increasingly capable in general, but their utility can remain modest in niche or understudied areas. One approach to address this limitation is to specialise existing models...
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:2605. 30580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding is a popular technique for large language model (LLM) inference, enabling faster generation by drafting multiple tokens with a smaller draft model.
Modern large language models are pretrained on massive datasets, making it difficult to prevent benchmark data from entering their training sets and undermining the reliability of evaluation results....