arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

IKS-Instruct: A 24,000-Example Multilingual Dataset for Teaching Language Models Indian Knowledge Systems

arXiv:2607. 23322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Instruction tuning has become the standard method for adapting large language models to follow human intent, yet existing instruction datasets are dominated by English-language general-knowledge tasks and lack coverage of specialized pedagogical domains.

By Shwetha Singaravelu, Gayathri Muruganantham, Lakshmi Rajendran, Santhosh Sivasubramani
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

EuroAlpaca: Task-Preserving Localisation of Instruction Data for European Languages

EuroAlpaca presents a task‑preserving localisation pipeline that translates English instruction‑tuning data into 50 European languages while maintaining task‑critical constraints. The method uses field‑wise machine translation or reconstructs task‑equivalent target‑language instances, followed by validation of coherence and consistency. Experiments show that EuroAlpaca improves instruction‑following accuracy by 12.9% over a baseline and outperforms direct translation on ROUGE‑L and F‑BERT metrics.

By Aleix Sant, Jordi Luque, Carlos Escolano
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Fine-Tuning LLMs for Translation: General Forgetting Mitigation Does Not Preserve MT-Specific Instruction Following

Fine‑tuning large language models on parallel data can improve translation quality but also causes catastrophic forgetting of general capabilities. The study evaluates several forgetting‑mitigation methods—anchored to auxiliary data, model outputs, and base model parameters—using Llama 3.2 1B Instruct and Llama 3.1 8B Instruct on Arabic‑English and Spanish‑English translation tasks. Elastic Weight Consolidation best preserves general benchmark performance, yet only data mixing with control‑task examples maintains instruction‑following abilities such as formality and grammatical gender control, though these gains do not generalize to unseen prompts.

By Niklas Scholz, David Thulke, Abdallah Nasir, Will Allred, Evgeny Matusov, Hermann Ney
arXiv AI
Sep 3

DKL: Decoupled Knowledge Learning for Instruction-Tuned Language Models

The paper introduces DKL, a method for adding new knowledge to instruction‑tuned language models without compromising their instruction‑following abilities. DKL performs extended pre‑training on a base LLM to embed knowledge, then merges these weights into the instruction‑tuned model, avoiding costly instruction fine‑tuning. Experiments show DKL raises RAG accuracy from 54.17% to 79.26% on retrieval failure cases while using far less training data than previous approaches.

By Kushagra Bhushan, Meghanadh Pulivarthi, Sai Krishna Reddy Sathi, Gaurav Pandey, Sonam Gupta, Vineet Kumar, Jaydeep Sen, Yatin Nandwani, Sachindra Joshi, Dinesh Raghu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

E-CONAN (Entailment, CONtradition And Neutral) Benchmarks: Arabic Textual Entailment and Natural Inference Datasets

E-CONAN introduces Arabic textual entailment and natural inference benchmarks comprising two datasets: E-CONAN-2 (2-way RTE) and E-CONAN-3 (3-way NLI). The datasets are built from automatically-translated pairs, human-validated machine translations, hand-crafted pairs from Arabic teaching books, and rumor-containing news headlines. The authors evaluated nine multilingual pretrained models and five large language models on these benchmarks, demonstrating that E-CONAN offers a more diverse and robust assessment than existing datasets like XNLI and ArNLI.

By Khloud AL Jallad, Nada Ghneim, Ghaida Rebdawi