arXiv AI

Data Synthesis and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Low-Resource NMT: A Case Study on Q'eqchi' Mayan

arXiv:2606. 09767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural machine translation for digitally low-resource Indigenous languages is often hindered by extreme data scarcity, prompting reliance on extractive web-scraping.

arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

It's All Training: A Fully Synthetic Single-Stage Recipe for LLMs

arXiv:2609.37891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current pre-training datasets are derived from web crawls, with all their issues, and were not designed to support mid- and post-training pipelines--...

By Pierre-Carl Langlais, Pieter Delobelle, Yannick Detrois, Pavel Chizhov, Carlos Rosas-Hinostroza, Neil Si Smail, Benjamin Burtin, Hanna Shcharbakova, Ivan Yamshchikov, Anastasia Stasenko
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

A Factorial Study of Synthetic Data Generation for Low-Resource Machine Translation using Grammar Books

The paper presents a pipeline that leverages large language models to extract grammatical rules, example sentences, and lexicons from descriptive grammar books, producing synthetic parallel corpora for fine‑tuning machine translation models. Evaluated on three low‑resource languages—Kalamang, Tuatschin, and Mandan—the synthetic data improves translation quality over seed‑data baselines in 75% of configurations for Kalamang and 59% for Tuatschin, achieving up to +8.8 ChrF++ gains. A factorial study across 96 configurations identifies which combinations of target part‑of‑speech, retrieval granularity, and sample volume drive performance gains and where they fail, demonstrating that static linguistic documentation can be repurposed for practical translation tools for severely under‑resourced languages.

By Varun Ghat Ravikumar, Sina Ahmadi, Lena J\"ager, Rico Sennrich
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Tag-Aware Structured Text Translation: Towards a Systematic Understanding

The paper introduces a systematic approach to tag-aware translation, addressing the trade-off between structural tag diversity and translation naturalness in synthetic data. It proposes a hybrid synthesis strategy (Hy‑LST) and a multi‑task fine‑tuning framework that decomposes translation into four sub‑tasks. Additionally, it employs a group relative policy optimization with three reward functions—fluency, tag fidelity, and tag‑scoped translation quality—to jointly optimize these objectives, achieving superior performance across six language pairs.

By Zhanglin Wu, Hengchao Shang, Daimeng Wei, Jiaxin Guo, Zongyao Li, Tengfei Song, Ning Xie, Weidong Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 18

QVAC Genesis III: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Open Synthetic STEM Corpus for Efficient Language Model Pre-Training

QVAC Genesis III is a 191.43 B‑token synthetic STEM corpus covering 19 domains and multiple difficulty levels, created through a dual generation strategy that uses a weak edge‑scale student model to generate corrective explanations and contrastive reasoning. The authors evaluate the corpus with an LLM‑as‑a‑parser protocol and demonstrate that 1.7 B‑parameter models trained on QVAC Genesis III outperform those trained on Cosmopedia‑v2 and the Cosmo‑1B model on ARC, GPQA Diamond, and MMLU STEM benchmarks, achieving up to +28.57% improvement on ARC‑E and a 99.45% valid answer rate.

By Davide Vitabile, N. Ranjan, Akshay Nambiar, Kamal K. Gupta, Amril Nazir
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Generating Pretraining Tokens from Organic Data for Data-Bound Scaling

The paper introduces SynPro, a synthetic data generation framework that augments limited organic text for large language model pretraining by applying rephrasing and reformatting operations. SynPro’s generators are optimized with reinforcement learning rewards for quality, faithfulness, and data influence, and are updated continuously as training plateaus. Experiments on 400M, 1.1B, and 2B models show that SynPro can unlock 3.4–5.2× the effective tokens of standard repetition, even outperforming a non‑data‑bound oracle at larger scales.

By Zichun Yu, Chenyan Xiong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Embedding Initialization for Unseen Low-resource Languages in Multilingual NMT: A Case Study on Limbum-English Translation

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Reasoning over Grammar: Can Synthetic Linguistic Reasoning Traces Enhance Low-Resource Machine Translation?

The paper explores whether structured linguistic reasoning traces can improve low‑resource machine translation by guiding large language models (LLMs). It proposes a pipeline that automatically generates step‑by‑step reasoning traces from Universal Dependencies treebanks, dictionaries, and grammar‑rule banks, and evaluates these traces in in‑context learning, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement fine‑tuning on Xibe and Chintang. The results show that providing reliable reasoning traces at inference time significantly boosts translation quality, whereas using them as training data yields smaller, less consistent gains, indicating that LLMs can benefit from grammatical guidance but struggle to generate accurate analyses themselves.

By Renhao Pei, Yihong Liu, Sampo Pyysalo, Hinrich Sch\"utze, Shaoxiong Ji
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Characterizing Model-Native Skills

arXiv:2604.17614v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Skills are a natural unit for describing what a language model can do and how its behavior can be changed. However, existing characterization...

By Feiyang Kang, Mahavir Dabas, Myeongseob Ko, Ruoxi Jia
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

LuxIT: A Luxembourgish Instruction Tuning Dataset from Monolingual Seed Data

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.

By Julian Valline, Cedric Lothritz, Siwen Guo, Jordi Cabot