arXiv:2607. 08731v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A national language model offers a linguistic community its own instrument for measuring what its citizens say and value.
By Manuel Pita
arXiv:2607. 08731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: National language models are becoming publicly funded epistemic infrastructure.
By Manuel Pita
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
When a tool-using agent is given the same task in a different language, does it still take the same steps? Multilingual evaluation rarely asks: it compares final answers and discards the actions.
arXiv:2607. 04581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text embeddings for Portuguese have no dedicated benchmark: evaluation rests on translated corpora such as English MS MARCO or on thin multilingual coverage, with native tasks scattered and unconsolidated.
By Tardelli Ronan Coelho Stekel
Brazilian Portuguese remains under-served by open language models, and the few that exist are difficult to reproduce and are often compared without measures of uncertainty. We release Manacá-1B, an op...