arXiv Computation and Language
Training a Language Model End-to-End in Rust: An Experience Report
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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11
Numbat: Building and Verifying a Self-Contained Machine-Learning Stack
The paper introduces Numbat, a self‑contained machine‑learning stack implemented entirely in Zig with no external runtime dependencies. It covers tensor computation, automatic differentiation, neural‑network modules, mixed precision, multi‑GPU training, data loading, and monitoring, and exposes a stable C ABI with over 1,400 entry points and bindings for six languages. The authors verify the stack against a reference implementation at multiple levels, uncovering ten silent recipe divergences, and demonstrate its practical capability by training a 25.9M‑parameter YOLOv8m detector on COCO 2017, achieving a competitive mAP score and matching single‑GPU performance.
arXiv AI
Aug 20
Latent Space Refusal Anchoring for Low-Resource African Languages: Mechanistic Safety Recovery Without Retraining
The paper introduces Latent Space Refusal Anchoring (LSR‑Anchoring), a training‑free technique that extracts a refusal direction from English prompts and applies it to the residual stream of instruction‑tuned models at inference time. The primary variant, Mean‑Activation Steering (MAS), works across several architectures (Llama‑3‑8B, Llama‑3.1‑70B, Mistral‑7B‑Instruct, Qwen2.5‑7B), restoring safety for low‑resource African languages with minimal performance loss, while a refined SAE‑Derived Steering (SDS) further reduces KL divergence without degrading legitimate prompt performance. The method shows positive transfer for Yoruba, Igbo, Igala, and Hausa, but fails for Arabic, suggesting a geometric mismatch rather than a data scarcity issue.
arXiv AI
Jul 22
The Information Shadow: Measuring Structural Limits on What Language Models Can Learn
arXiv:2607. 18305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some limits on what language models know are not gaps in data coverage but structural properties of learning from text.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19
Thinking in a Low-Resource Language: What SFT Builds, What RL Fixes, What Accuracy Cannot See
The paper evaluates how three large mixture‑of‑experts models (Alibaba, OpenAI, NVIDIA) can be fine‑tuned to reason in a low‑resource language, specifically Greek. Accuracy metrics show little change, but the authors uncover significant qualitative improvements: after supervised fine‑tuning, models reason in Greek on ~98% of items, with better grammaticality and retained general ability. Reinforcement learning with pre‑registered rewards further eliminates reasoning‑channel leaks and format skips, while the Greek‑reasoning habit remains robust to an accuracy‑only gradient.
arXiv AI
Sep 1
Arkios: An Open Bilingual English-Nepali Language Model Trained From Scratch, with a Devanagari-Aware Tokenizer
arXiv:2608.30092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Arkios, a 1.04B-parameter dense transformer pretrained from scratch on 150B tokens of bilingual English-Nepali text, using a custom single...
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5
M-GATE: Multilingual Grammar, Accuracy in Translation, and Efficiency Benchmark for Large Language Models
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.