arXiv AI By Pragyan Phukan

AssameseLM-E2B: An Open-Weight Assamese Language Model for Efficient Consumer-Grade Deployment

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The paper introduces AssameseLM-E2B, a 2‑billion‑parameter language model tailored for the low‑resource Assamese language, and its instruction‑tuned variant AssameseLM-E2B‑it. Built on the Gemma‑4 architecture, it uses an expanded byte‑level BPE vocabulary that cuts tokenization overhead by nearly 500 % compared with multilingual baselines, and employs a parameter‑efficient Continual Pre‑Training pipeline with Hybrid LoRA followed by supervised fine‑tuning on a balanced, multi‑domain dataset. Evaluation shows strong performance with a Bits‑per‑Byte score of 0.7488 on FLORES‑200, a 96.7 % RAG score, and 100 % refusal accuracy on adversarial prompts, highlighting the effectiveness of parameter‑efficient adaptation for locally deployable models under constrained resources.

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