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:2410. 07809v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multilingual instruction tuning (MIT) is challenged by the curse of multilinguality, data scarcity, and high computational cost.
By G\"urkan Soykan, G\"ozde G\"ul \c{S}ahin
arXiv:2604.13286v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Despite the widespread multilingual deployment of large language models, post-training pipelines remain predominantly English-centric, contributing...
By Mehak Dhaliwal, Shashwat Chaurasia, Yao Qin, Dezhi Hong, Thomas Butler
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
The paper investigates weight‑space merging of independently fine‑tuned multilingual machine translation models. Experiments show that merging is more successful when models share a target language, yet it still cannot match the peak performance of language‑specific checkpoints. When target languages differ, performance drops sharply, and analysis reveals that overlapping neuron activation and incompatible upper‑layer geometries cause these failures.
By Baban Gain, Trilok Nath Singh, Asif Ekbal
We present DONDO, a family of open, permissively licensed automatic speech recognition (ASR) base models for African languages, built on the w2v-BERT 2. 0 self-supervised speech encoder.
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
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."
By Anjishnu Mukherjee, Ziwei Zhu, Antonios Anastasopoulos
arXiv:2609. 20945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Undesired information such as harmful content and private data propagates through Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) via direct training and indirect cross-linguistic spread.
By Kyomin Hwang, Hyeonjin Kim, Hyunho Lee, Yearim Kim, Yeji Song, Nojun Kwak
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:2512. 20757v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tokenizers provide the fundamental basis through which text is represented and processed by language models (LMs).
By G\"ul Sena Alt{\i}nta\c{s}, Malikeh Ehghaghi, Brian Lester, Fengyuan Liu, Wanru Zhao, Marco Ciccone, Colin Raffel
arXiv:2606. 03219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: African languages have very little labelled data, and it is unclear if augmenting the quantity of annotation data reliably enhances downstream performance.
By Anuj Tiwari, Oluwapelumi Ogunremu, Terry Oko-odion, Jesujuwon Egbewale, Hannah Nwokocha