arXiv:2601. 22888v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: More than 80% of the 1.
By Jio Oh, Paul Vicinanza, Thomas Butler, Steven Euijong Whang, Dezhi Hong, Amani Namboori
The study investigates why language models exhibit systematic performance gaps across English dialects, a phenomenon termed the "dialect tax." Using parallel dialect corpora that preserve meaning while altering surface form, the authors confirm that models treat Standard American English and dialectal texts as semantically equivalent, yet find representational disparities that persist through tokenization, pre‑training, post‑training, and inference. Even a character‑level tokenizer does not eliminate input/output asymmetries or accuracy gaps, and dialect pairs produce more divergent gradient updates than unrelated Standard texts, indicating that dialectal content is harder for models to learn.
By Elle
arXiv:2608.12018v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at cross-lingual tasks but often fail to capture intra-lingual morphologica...
By Rakib Ullah, Md. Ruhul Islam, Tanbir Ahmed, Nayan Kumar Nath
Dialectal variation remains a major challenge for multilingual language models. Perturbation-based continued pre-training (CPT) has emerged as a promising approach to improving robustness, yet existing work largely evaluates individual perturbation strategies in isolation and provides limited insight into why they work.
arXiv:2605.28190v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Embedding benchmarks like MTEB report a single score per model, implicitly treating robustness as a static, scalar property. We argue that embeddin...
By Manuel Frank, Haithem Afli
The paper proposes a method for culturally aligning large language models (LLMs) using soft prompt tuning optimized via Differential Evolution (DE). Unlike traditional fine‑tuning or reinforcement learning, this approach keeps model weights frozen and requires no preference data, instead leveraging aggregated survey scores from Hofstede's Value Survey Module (VSM13). Experiments on four countries and four instruction‑tuned models show that DE‑optimized prompts reduce cultural discrepancy, improve agreement with the World Values Survey, and are preferred in blinded pairwise evaluations by LLM judges.
By Reem I. Masoud, Martin Ferianc, Philip Treleaven, Miguel Rodrigues