The study evaluates how different input representations—orthographic text, IPA transcription, and romanization—affect cross‑lingual transfer in autoregressive multilingual language models. Across three model sizes and eight languages grouped into typologically motivated pairs, romanized pretraining consistently outperforms native orthography and IPA, especially as model scale increases. Fine‑tuning a text‑pretrained model on romanized data can harm performance on languages already covered by the base model, suggesting romanization should be integrated at pretraining rather than applied later.
By Muge Zhang, Aaron Jencks, Krishna Badikela, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sachin Kumar
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.
By Samiratu Ntohsi, Neza David Tuyishimire, Anesu Kafesu, Marvin Ogore, Samuel Oluwajunwonlo Babalola, Oche Ankeli
Low-resource languages remain challenging for machine translation, and Mongolian is a representative case. As a digraphic language, Mongolian is written in both Cyrillic and Traditional scripts, which exhibit a severe imbalance in data availability.
arXiv:2609.39640v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Cross-lingual transfer describes how knowledge in a source language benefits a target language. Measuring it quantitatively requires broad multilingu...
By Dalton Raphael Harmsen, Swier Garst, Thomas van Osch, Zar\`e Palanciyan, Joaquin Vanschoren
Pixel language models treat text as rendered images, enabling strong cross‑lingual transfer. This study trains MPIXEL models varying languages, scripts, and capacity while keeping per‑language compute constant, and evaluates them on five tasks across 83 languages. Results show that scaling improves performance on added languages and scripts, mitigates the curse of multilinguality, and outperforms subword and character baselines on typologically distant low‑resource languages, though transfer to unseen scripts does not benefit further from scaling.
By Ilker Kesen, Jenny Kunz, Kasra Malihi, Desmond Elliott
arXiv:2510. 07074v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Instruction tuning has become a key technique for enhancing the performance of large language models, enabling them to better follow human prompts.
By Fred Philippy, Laura Bernardy, Siwen Guo, Jacques Klein, Tegawend\'e F. Bissyand\'e
The paper introduces the problem of cross‑lingual loopholes in large language model (LLM) unlearning, where forgetting a fact in one language can leave it accessible in others. It presents a new 174‑language benchmark, the Cross‑Lingual Unlearning Tensor, and proposes COVER, a method that selects a subset of source languages to maximize unlearning coverage under a language budget. Experiments show COVER reduces residual knowledge by 7.8–27.3% compared to uniform selection and works on both synthetic and real low‑resource news data.
By Tyler Skow, Shravan Chaudhari, Rama Chellappa, Abhay Yadav
The paper introduces Universal Byte-Level Encoding (UBE), a dual‑alphabet tokenizer that routes 3‑4‑byte UTF‑8 characters through UTF‑16 while keeping 1‑2‑byte characters on the UTF‑8 path. This design lowers the worst‑case token‑budget disparity for high‑premium scripts without increasing costs for efficient English spans, and it preserves standard BPE merges and exact decoding. In extensive Unicode audits and multilingual language‑model experiments, UBE matches or improves token‑count efficiency and context usability compared to traditional byte‑pair encoding.
By Hyunsik Kim, Youngmoon Jung
arXiv:2609.23490v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly execute multi-step workflows through tool use and interaction with users and environments. However, curr...
By Peng Kuang, Yuchun Fan, Jiangnan Li, Minghao Wu, Jialong Tang, Hao-Ran Wei, Weixuan Wang, Jianhong Tu, Baosong Yang, Tong Xiao
arXiv:2607. 29355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-lingual transfer is central to low-resource machine translation, but its behavior within closely related language families remains insufficiently characterized.
By Omer Burak Cinar, Mehmet Mert Dalkilic, Cagri Toraman
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.
By Vihari Piratla, Purvam Jain, Darshan Singh, Trevor Cohn, Preethi Jyothi, Partha Talukdar
Agentic benchmarks aim to measure how well AI agents plan, search, execute, and recover within realistic multi-tool environments, but they are almost exclusively in English. As AI agents are globally deployed to a linguistically diverse user base, whether agentic competence measured in English transfers to other languages remains an open question.