Daily Papers

English-centric large language models (LLMs) often show strong multilingual capabilities. However, the multilingual performance of these models remains unclear and is not thoroughly evaluated for many languages. Most benchmarks for multilinguality focus on classic NLP tasks, or cover a minimal number of languages. We introduce MEXA, a method for assessing the multilingual capabilities of pre-trained English-centric LLMs using parallel sentences, which are available for more languages than existing downstream tasks. MEXA leverages the fact that English-centric LLMs use English as a kind of pivot language in their intermediate layers. It computes the alignment between English and non-English languages using parallel sentences to evaluate the transfer of language understanding from English to other languages. This alignment can be used to estimate model performance in other languages. We conduct studies using various parallel datasets (FLORES-200 and Bible), models (Llama family, Gemma family, Mistral, and OLMo), and established downstream tasks (Belebele, m-MMLU, and m-ARC). We explore different methods to compute embeddings in decoder-only models. Our results show that MEXA, in its default settings, achieves a statistically significant average Pearson correlation of 0.90 with three established downstream tasks across nine models and two parallel datasets. This suggests that MEXA is a reliable method for estimating the multilingual capabilities of English-centric LLMs, providing a clearer understanding of their multilingual potential and the inner workings of LLMs. Leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/cis-lmu/Mexa, Code: https://github.com/cisnlp/Mexa.

The vast majority of today's large language models are English-centric, having been pretrained predominantly on English text. Yet, in order to meet user expectations, models need to be able to respond appropriately in multiple languages once deployed in downstream applications. Given limited exposure to other languages during pretraining, cross-lingual transfer is important for achieving decent performance in non-English settings. In this work, we investigate just how much multilinguality is required during finetuning to elicit strong cross-lingual generalisation across a range of tasks and target languages. We find that, compared to English-only finetuning, multilingual instruction tuning with as few as three languages significantly improves a model's cross-lingual transfer abilities on generative tasks that assume input/output language agreement, while being of less importance for highly structured tasks. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/multilingual-instruction-tuning.

Existing work in translation demonstrated the potential of massively multilingual machine translation by training a single model able to translate between any pair of languages. However, much of this work is English-Centric by training only on data which was translated from or to English. While this is supported by large sources of training data, it does not reflect translation needs worldwide. In this work, we create a true Many-to-Many multilingual translation model that can translate directly between any pair of 100 languages. We build and open source a training dataset that covers thousands of language directions with supervised data, created through large-scale mining. Then, we explore how to effectively increase model capacity through a combination of dense scaling and language-specific sparse parameters to create high quality models. Our focus on non-English-Centric models brings gains of more than 10 BLEU when directly translating between non-English directions while performing competitively to the best single systems of WMT. We open-source our scripts so that others may reproduce the data, evaluation, and final M2M-100 model.

In this study, we investigate whether non-English-centric LLMs, despite their strong performance, `think' in their respective dominant language: more precisely, `think' refers to how the representations of intermediate layers, when un-embedded into the vocabulary space, exhibit higher probabilities for certain dominant languages during generation. We term such languages as internal latent languages. We examine the latent language of three typical categories of models for Japanese processing: Llama2, an English-centric model; Swallow, an English-centric model with continued pre-training in Japanese; and LLM-jp, a model pre-trained on balanced English and Japanese corpora. Our empirical findings reveal that, unlike Llama2 which relies exclusively on English as the internal latent language, Japanese-specific Swallow and LLM-jp employ both Japanese and English, exhibiting dual internal latent languages. For any given target language, the model preferentially activates the latent language most closely related to it. In addition, we explore how intermediate layers respond to questions involving cultural conflicts between latent internal and target output languages. We further explore how the language identity shifts across layers while keeping consistent semantic meaning reflected in the intermediate layer representations. This study deepens the understanding of non-English-centric large language models, highlighting the intricate dynamics of language representation within their intermediate layers.

Software engineers working with the same programming language (PL) may speak different natural languages (NLs) and vice versa, erecting huge barriers to communication and working efficiency. Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of generative pre-training in computer programs, yet they are always English-centric. In this work, we step towards bridging the gap between multilingual NLs and multilingual PLs for large language models (LLMs). We release ERNIE-Code, a unified pre-trained language model for 116 NLs and 6 PLs. We employ two methods for universal cross-lingual pre-training: span-corruption language modeling that learns patterns from monolingual NL or PL; and pivot-based translation language modeling that relies on parallel data of many NLs and PLs. Extensive results show that ERNIE-Code outperforms previous multilingual LLMs for PL or NL across a wide range of end tasks of code intelligence, including multilingual code-to-text, text-to-code, code-to-code, and text-to-text generation. We further show its advantage of zero-shot prompting on multilingual code summarization and text-to-text translation. We release our code and pre-trained checkpoints.

We present BgGPT-Gemma-2-27B-Instruct and BgGPT-Gemma-2-9B-Instruct: continually pretrained and fine-tuned versions of Google's Gemma-2 models, specifically optimized for Bulgarian language understanding and generation. Leveraging Gemma-2's multilingual capabilities and over 100 billion tokens of Bulgarian and English text data, our models demonstrate strong performance in Bulgarian language tasks, setting a new standard for language-specific AI models. Our approach maintains the robust capabilities of the original Gemma-2 models, ensuring that the English language performance remains intact. To preserve the base model capabilities, we incorporate continual learning strategies based on recent Branch-and-Merge techniques as well as thorough curation and selection of training data. We provide detailed insights into our methodology, including the release of model weights with a commercial-friendly license, enabling broader adoption by researchers, companies, and hobbyists. Further, we establish a comprehensive set of benchmarks based on non-public educational data sources to evaluate models on Bulgarian language tasks as well as safety and chat capabilities. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of fine-tuning state-of-the-art models like Gemma 2 to enhance language-specific AI applications while maintaining cross-lingual capabilities.

We present CrossSum, a large-scale cross-lingual abstractive summarization dataset comprising 1.7 million article-summary samples in 1500+ language pairs. We create CrossSum by aligning identical articles written in different languages via cross-lingual retrieval from a multilingual summarization dataset. We propose a multi-stage data sampling algorithm to effectively train a cross-lingual summarization model capable of summarizing an article in any target language. We also propose LaSE, a new metric for automatically evaluating model-generated summaries and showing a strong correlation with ROUGE. Performance on ROUGE and LaSE indicate that pretrained models fine-tuned on CrossSum consistently outperform baseline models, even when the source and target language pairs are linguistically distant. To the best of our knowledge, CrossSum is the largest cross-lingual summarization dataset and the first-ever that does not rely solely on English as the pivot language. We are releasing the dataset, alignment and training scripts, and the models to spur future research on cross-lingual abstractive summarization. The resources can be found at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/CrossSum.

Despite the predominance of English in their training data, English-centric Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and LLaMA display a remarkable ability to perform multilingual tasks, raising questions about the depth and nature of their cross-lingual capabilities. This paper introduces the decomposed prompting approach to probe the linguistic structure understanding of these LLMs in sequence labeling tasks. Diverging from the single text-to-text prompt, our method generates for each token of the input sentence an individual prompt which asks for its linguistic label. We assess our method on the Universal Dependencies part-of-speech tagging dataset for 38 languages, utilizing both English-centric and multilingual LLMs. Our findings show that decomposed prompting surpasses the iterative prompting baseline in efficacy and efficiency under zero- and few-shot settings. Further analysis reveals the influence of evaluation methods and the use of instructions in prompts. Our multilingual investigation shows that English-centric language models perform better on average than multilingual models. Our study offers insights into the multilingual transferability of English-centric LLMs, contributing to the understanding of their multilingual linguistic knowledge.

Language confusion -- where large language models (LLMs) generate unintended languages against the user's need -- remains a critical challenge, especially for English-centric models. We present the first mechanistic interpretability (MI) study of language confusion, combining behavioral benchmarking with neuron-level analysis. Using the Language Confusion Benchmark (LCB), we show that confusion points (CPs) -- specific positions where language switches occur -- are central to this phenomenon. Through layer-wise analysis with TunedLens and targeted neuron attribution, we reveal that transition failures in the final layers drive confusion. We further demonstrate that editing a small set of critical neurons, identified via comparative analysis with multilingual-tuned models, substantially mitigates confusion without harming general competence or fluency. Our approach matches multilingual alignment in confusion reduction for most languages and yields cleaner, higher-quality outputs. These findings provide new insights into the internal dynamics of LLMs and highlight neuron-level interventions as a promising direction for robust, interpretable multilingual language modeling.

The scarcity of non-English data limits the development of non-English large language models (LLMs). Transforming English-centric LLMs to non-English has been identified as an effective and resource-efficient method. Previous works start from base LLMs and perform knowledge distillation (KD) with data generated by stronger LLMs, e.g. GPT-4. Compared to base LLMs, chat LLMs are further optimized for advanced abilities, e.g. multi-turn conversation and human preference alignment, and thus more powerful in both helpfulness and safety. However, transforming a chat LLM involves two critical issues: (1) How can we effectively transfer advanced abilities without their supervised data? (2) How can we prevent the original knowledge from catastrophic forgetting during transformation? We target these issues by introducing a simple framework called TransLLM. For the first issue, TransLLM divides the transfer problem into some common sub-tasks with the translation chain-of-thought, which uses the translation as the bridge between English and non-English step-by-step. We further enhance the performance of sub-tasks with publicly available data. For the second issue, we propose a method comprising two synergistic components: low-rank adaptation for training to maintain the original LLM parameters, and recovery KD, which utilizes data generated by the chat LLM itself to recover the original knowledge from the frozen parameters. In the experiments, we transform the LLaMA-2-chat-7B to the Thai language. Our method, using only single-turn data, outperforms strong baselines and ChatGPT on multi-turn benchmark MT-bench. Furthermore, our method, without safety data, rejects more harmful queries of safety benchmark AdvBench than both ChatGPT and GPT-4.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong machine translation capabilities for English-centric language pairs but underperform in direct non-English (x2x) translation. This work addresses this limitation through a synthetic data generation framework that leverages models' established English-to-x (en2x) capabilities. By extending English parallel corpora into omnidirectional datasets and developing an English-referenced quality evaluation proxy, we enable effective collection of high-quality x2x training data. Combined with preference-based optimization, our method achieves significant improvement across 72 x2x directions for widely used LLMs, while generalizing to enhance en2x performance. The results demonstrate that strategic exploitation of English-centric strengths can bootstrap comprehensive multilingual translation capabilities in LLMs. We release codes, datasets, and model checkpoints at https://github.com/NJUNLP/EAX

Large language models (LLMs) have multilingual capabilities and can solve tasks across various languages. However, we show that current LLMs make key decisions in a representation space closest to English, regardless of their input and output languages. Exploring the internal representations with a logit lens for sentences in French, German, Dutch, and Mandarin, we show that the LLM first emits representations close to English for semantically-loaded words before translating them into the target language. We further show that activation steering in these LLMs is more effective when the steering vectors are computed in English rather than in the language of the inputs and outputs. This suggests that multilingual LLMs perform key reasoning steps in a representation that is heavily shaped by English in a way that is not transparent to system users.

We introduce Jais and Jais-chat, new state-of-the-art Arabic-centric foundation and instruction-tuned open generative large language models (LLMs). The models are based on the GPT-3 decoder-only architecture and are pretrained on a mixture of Arabic and English texts, including source code in various programming languages. With 13 billion parameters, they demonstrate better knowledge and reasoning capabilities in Arabic than any existing open Arabic and multilingual models by a sizable margin, based on extensive evaluation. Moreover, the models are competitive in English compared to English-centric open models of similar size, despite being trained on much less English data. We provide a detailed description of the training, the tuning, the safety alignment, and the evaluation of the models. We release two open versions of the model -- the foundation Jais model, and an instruction-tuned Jais-chat variant -- with the aim of promoting research on Arabic LLMs. Available at https://huggingface.co/inception-mbzuai/jais-13b-chat

Large language models have significantly advanced Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT), yet the broad language coverage, consistent translation quality, and English-centric bias remain open challenges. To address these challenges, we introduce LMT, a suite of Large-scale Multilingual Translation models centered on both Chinese and English, covering 60 languages and 234 translation directions. During development, we identify a previously overlooked phenomenon of directional degeneration, where symmetric multi-way fine-tuning data overemphasize reverse directions (X to En/Zh), leading to excessive many-to-one mappings and degraded translation quality. We propose Strategic Downsampling, a simple yet effective method to mitigate this degeneration. In addition, we design Parallel Multilingual Prompting (PMP), which leverages typologically related auxiliary languages to enhance cross-lingual transfer. Through rigorous data curation and refined adaptation strategies, LMT achieves SOTA performance among models of comparable language coverage, with our 4B model (LMT-60-4B) surpassing the much larger Aya-101-13B and NLLB-54B models by a substantial margin. We release LMT in four sizes (0.6B/1.7B/4B/8B) to catalyze future research and provide strong baselines for inclusive, scalable, and high-quality MMT \href{https://github.com/NiuTrans/LMT{https://github.com/NiuTrans/LMT}}.

We introduce CroissantLLM, a 1.3B language model pretrained on a set of 3T English and French tokens, to bring to the research and industrial community a high-performance, fully open-sourced bilingual model that runs swiftly on consumer-grade local hardware. To that end, we pioneer the approach of training an intrinsically bilingual model with a 1:1 English-to-French pretraining data ratio, a custom tokenizer, and bilingual finetuning datasets. We release the training dataset, notably containing a French split with manually curated, high-quality, and varied data sources. To assess performance outside of English, we craft a novel benchmark, FrenchBench, consisting of an array of classification and generation tasks, covering various orthogonal aspects of model performance in the French Language. Additionally, rooted in transparency and to foster further Large Language Model research, we release codebases, and dozens of checkpoints across various model sizes, training data distributions, and training steps, as well as fine-tuned Chat models, and strong translation models. We evaluate our model through the FMTI framework, and validate 81 % of the transparency criteria, far beyond the scores of even most open initiatives. This work enriches the NLP landscape, breaking away from previous English-centric work in order to strengthen our understanding of multilinguality in language models.

Efficiently retrieving and synthesizing information from large-scale multimodal collections has become a critical challenge. However, existing video retrieval datasets suffer from scope limitations, primarily focusing on matching descriptive but vague queries with small collections of professionally edited, English-centric videos. To address this gap, we introduce MultiVENT 2.0, a large-scale, multilingual event-centric video retrieval benchmark featuring a collection of more than 218,000 news videos and 3,906 queries targeting specific world events. These queries specifically target information found in the visual content, audio, embedded text, and text metadata of the videos, requiring systems leverage all these sources to succeed at the task. Preliminary results show that state-of-the-art vision-language models struggle significantly with this task, and while alternative approaches show promise, they are still insufficient to adequately address this problem. These findings underscore the need for more robust multimodal retrieval systems, as effective video retrieval is a crucial step towards multimodal content understanding and generation tasks.

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, and even the few that are multilingual tend to exhibit strong English-centric biases. Much like speakers who might produce awkward expressions when learning a second language, LLMs often generate unnatural outputs in non-English languages, reflecting English-centric patterns in both vocabulary and grammar. Despite the importance of this issue, the naturalness of multilingual LLM outputs has received limited attention. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing novel automatic corpus-level metrics to assess the lexical and syntactic naturalness of LLM outputs in a multilingual context. Using our new metrics, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on a curated benchmark in French and Chinese, revealing a tendency towards English-influenced patterns. To mitigate this issue, we also propose a simple and effective alignment method to improve the naturalness of an LLM in a target language and domain, achieving consistent improvements in naturalness without compromising the performance on general-purpose benchmarks. Our work highlights the importance of developing multilingual metrics, resources and methods for the new wave of multilingual LLMs.

We present Llama-GENBA-10B, a trilingual foundation model addressing English-centric bias in large language models. Built on Llama 3.1-8B and scaled to 10B parameters, Llama-GENBA-10B is continuously pretrained on 164B tokens (82B English, 82B German, and 80M Bavarian), balancing resources while preventing English dominance. Targeted at the German NLP community, the model also promotes Bavarian as a low-resource language. Development tackled four challenges: (1) curating a multilingual corpus despite Bavarian scarcity, (2) creating a unified tokenizer for English, German, and Bavarian, (3) optimizing architecture and language-ratio hyperparameters for cross-lingual transfer, and (4) establishing the first standardized trilingual evaluation suite by translating German benchmarks into Bavarian. Evaluations show that Llama-GENBA-10B achieves strong cross-lingual performance, with the fine-tuned variant surpassing Apertus-8B-2509 and gemma-2-9b in Bavarian and establishing itself as the best model in its class for this language, while also outperforming EuroLLM in English and matching its results in German. Training on the Cerebras CS-2 demonstrated efficient large-scale multilingual pretraining with documented energy use, offering a blueprint for inclusive foundation models that integrate low-resource languages.

Multilingual proficiency presents a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). English-centric models are usually suboptimal in other languages, particularly those that are linguistically distant from English. This performance discrepancy mainly stems from the imbalanced distribution of training data across languages during pre-training and instruction tuning stages. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach called CrossIn, which utilizes a mixed composition of cross-lingual instruction tuning data. Our method leverages the compressed representation shared by various languages to efficiently enhance the model's task-solving capabilities and multilingual proficiency within a single process. In addition, we introduce a multi-task and multi-faceted benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of CrossIn. Experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves performance across tasks and languages, and we provide extensive insights into the impact of cross-lingual data volume and the integration of translation data on enhancing multilingual consistency and accuracy.

Multilingual transfer ability, which reflects how well the models fine-tuned on one source language can be applied to other languages, has been well studied in multilingual pre-trained models (e.g., BLOOM). However, such ability has not been investigated for English-centric models (e.g., LLaMA). To fill this gap, we study the following research questions. First, does multilingual transfer ability exist in English-centric models and how does it compare with multilingual pretrained models? Second, does it only appears when English is the source language for the English-centric model? Third, how does it vary in different tasks? We take multilingual reasoning ability as our focus and conduct extensive experiments across four types of reasoning tasks. We find that the multilingual pretrained model does not always outperform an English-centric model. Furthermore, English appears to be a less suitable source language, and the choice of source language becomes less important when the English-centric model scales up. In addition, different types of tasks exhibit different multilingual transfer abilities. These findings demonstrate that English-centric models not only possess multilingual transfer ability but may even surpass the transferability of multilingual pretrained models if well-trained. By showing the strength and weaknesses, the experiments also provide valuable insights into enhancing multilingual reasoning abilities for the English-centric models.

Reasoning capabilities of large language models are primarily studied for English, even when pretrained models are multilingual. In this work, we investigate to what extent English reasoning finetuning with long chain-of-thoughts (CoTs) can generalize across languages. First, we find that scaling up inference compute for English-centric reasoning language models (RLMs) improves multilingual mathematical reasoning across many languages including low-resource languages, to an extent where they outperform models twice their size. Second, we reveal that while English-centric RLM's CoTs are naturally predominantly English, they consistently follow a quote-and-think pattern to reason about quoted non-English inputs. Third, we discover an effective strategy to control the language of long CoT reasoning, and we observe that models reason better and more efficiently in high-resource languages. Finally, we observe poor out-of-domain reasoning generalization, in particular from STEM to cultural commonsense knowledge, even for English. Overall, we demonstrate the potentials, study the mechanisms and outline the limitations of crosslingual generalization of English reasoning test-time scaling. We conclude that practitioners should let English-centric RLMs reason in high-resource languages, while further work is needed to improve reasoning in low-resource languages and out-of-domain contexts.

Despite rapid progress in large language models (LLMs), their performance on a vast majority of languages remain unsatisfactory. In this paper, we study building language-specific LLMs by adapting monolingual and multilingual LLMs. We conduct systematic experiments on how design choices (base model selection, vocabulary extension, and continued fine-tuning) impact the adapted LLM, both in terms of efficiency (how many tokens are needed to encode the same amount of information) and end task performance. We find that (1) the initial performance before the adaptation is not always indicative of the final performance. (2) Efficiency can easily improved with simple vocabulary extension and continued fine-tuning in most LLMs we study, and (3) The optimal adaptation method is highly language-dependent, and the simplest approach works well across various experimental settings. Adapting English-centric models can yield better results than adapting multilingual models despite their worse initial performance on low-resource languages. Together, our work lays foundations on efficiently building language-specific LLMs by adapting existing LLMs.

We present the HPLT (High Performance Language Technologies) language resources, a new massive multilingual dataset including both monolingual and bilingual corpora extracted from CommonCrawl and previously unused web crawls from the Internet Archive. We describe our methods for data acquisition, management and processing of large corpora, which rely on open-source software tools and high-performance computing. Our monolingual collection focuses on low- to medium-resourced languages and covers 75 languages and a total of ~5.6 trillion word tokens de-duplicated on the document level. Our English-centric parallel corpus is derived from its monolingual counterpart and covers 18 language pairs and more than 96 million aligned sentence pairs with roughly 1.4 billion English tokens. The HPLT language resources are one of the largest open text corpora ever released, providing a great resource for language modeling and machine translation training. We publicly release the corpora, the software, and the tools used in this work.

Existing multilingual machine translation approaches mainly focus on English-centric directions, while the non-English directions still lag behind. In this work, we aim to build a many-to-many translation system with an emphasis on the quality of non-English language directions. Our intuition is based on the hypothesis that a universal cross-language representation leads to better multilingual translation performance. To this end, we propose mRASP2, a training method to obtain a single unified multilingual translation model. mRASP2 is empowered by two techniques: a) a contrastive learning scheme to close the gap among representations of different languages, and b) data augmentation on both multiple parallel and monolingual data to further align token representations. For English-centric directions, mRASP2 outperforms existing best unified model and achieves competitive or even better performance than the pre-trained and fine-tuned model mBART on tens of WMT's translation directions. For non-English directions, mRASP2 achieves an improvement of average 10+ BLEU compared with the multilingual Transformer baseline. Code, data and trained models are available at https://github.com/PANXiao1994/mRASP2.

Subword tokenization requires balancing computational efficiency and vocabulary coverage, which often leads to suboptimal performance on languages and scripts not prioritized during training. We propose to augment pretrained language models with a vocabulary-free encoder that generates input embeddings from text rendered as pixels. Through experiments on English-centric language models, we demonstrate that our approach substantially improves machine translation performance and facilitates effective cross-lingual transfer, outperforming tokenizer-based methods. Furthermore, we find that pixel-based representations outperform byte-level approaches and standard vocabulary expansion. Our approach enhances the multilingual capabilities of monolingual language models without extensive retraining and reduces decoding latency via input compression.

Synthetic data has become a cornerstone for scaling large language models, yet its multilingual use remains bottlenecked by translation-based prompts. This strategy inherits English-centric framing and style and neglects cultural dimensions, ultimately constraining model generalization. We argue that the overlooked prompt space-the very inputs that define training distributions-offers a more powerful lever for improving multilingual performance. We introduce a lightweight framework for prompt-space optimization, where translated prompts are systematically transformed for Naturalness, Cultural Adaptation, and Difficulty Enhancement. Using an off-the-shelf multilingual LLM, we apply these transformations to prompts for 12 languages spanning 7 families. Under identical data conditions, our approaches achieve substantial and consistent downstream improvements over the translation-only baseline: +4.7% on Global-MMLU accuracy, +2.4% on Flores XCometXL and +35.3% wins in preferences on mArenaHard. We establish prompt-space optimization as a simple yet powerful paradigm for building multilingual LLMs that are more robust, culturally grounded, and globally capable.

Chat models (i.e. language models trained to follow instructions through conversation with humans) outperform base models (i.e. trained solely on unlabeled data) in both conversation and general task-solving abilities. These models are generally English-centric and require further adaptation for languages that are underrepresented in or absent from their training data. A common technique for adapting base models is to extend the model's vocabulary with target language tokens, i.e. vocabulary expansion (VE), and then continually pre-train it on language-specific data. Using chat data is ideal for chat model adaptation, but often, either this does not exist or is costly to construct. Alternatively, adapting chat models with unlabeled data is a possible solution, but it could result in catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we investigate the impact of using unlabeled target language data for VE on chat models for the first time. We first show that off-the-shelf VE generally performs well across target language tasks and models in 71% of cases, though it underperforms in scenarios where source chat models are already strong. To further improve adapted models, we propose post-hoc techniques that inject information from the source model without requiring any further training. Experiments reveal the effectiveness of our methods, helping the adapted models to achieve performance improvements in 87% of cases.

As global demand for multilingual large language models (LLMs) grows, most LLMs still remain overly focused on English, leading to the limited access to advanced AI for non-English speakers. Current methods to enhance multilingual capabilities largely rely on data-driven post-training techniques, such as multilingual instruction tuning or continual pre-training. However, these approaches exhibit significant limitations, including high resource cost, exacerbation of off-target issue and catastrophic forgetting of central language abilities. To this end, we propose Lens, a novel approach that enhances multilingual capabilities by leveraging LLMs' internal language representation spaces. Lens operates on two subspaces: the language-agnostic subspace, where it aligns target languages with the central language to inherit strong semantic representations, and the language-specific subspace, where it separates target and central languages to preserve linguistic specificity. Experiments on three English-centric LLMs show that Lens significantly improves multilingual performance while maintaining the model's English proficiency, achieving better results with less computational cost compared to existing post-training approaches.

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain difficult to evaluate comprehensively, particularly for languages other than English, where high-quality data is often limited. Existing benchmarks and leaderboards are predominantly English-centric, with only a few addressing other languages. These benchmarks fall short in several key areas: they overlook the diversity of language varieties, prioritize fundamental Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities over tasks of industrial relevance, and are static. With these aspects in mind, we present IberBench, a comprehensive and extensible benchmark designed to assess LLM performance on both fundamental and industry-relevant NLP tasks, in languages spoken across the Iberian Peninsula and Ibero-America. IberBench integrates 101 datasets from evaluation campaigns and recent benchmarks, covering 22 task categories such as sentiment and emotion analysis, toxicity detection, and summarization. The benchmark addresses key limitations in current evaluation practices, such as the lack of linguistic diversity and static evaluation setups by enabling continual updates and community-driven model and dataset submissions moderated by a committee of experts. We evaluate 23 LLMs ranging from 100 million to 14 billion parameters and provide empirical insights into their strengths and limitations. Our findings indicate that (i) LLMs perform worse on industry-relevant tasks than in fundamental ones, (ii) performance is on average lower for Galician and Basque, (iii) some tasks show results close to random, and (iv) in other tasks LLMs perform above random but below shared task systems. IberBench offers open-source implementations for the entire evaluation pipeline, including dataset normalization and hosting, incremental evaluation of LLMs, and a publicly accessible leaderboard.

Pre-training data shapes a language model's quality, but raw web text is noisy and demands careful cleaning. Existing large-scale corpora rely on English-centric or language-agnostic pipelines whose heuristics do not capture Thai script or cultural nuances, leaving risky material such as gambling content untreated. Prior Thai-specific efforts customize pipelines or build new ones, yet seldom release their data or document design choices, hindering reproducibility and raising the question of how to construct a transparent, high-quality Thai corpus. We introduce Mangosteen: a 47 billion-token Thai corpus built through a Thai-adapted Dolma pipeline that includes custom rule-based language ID, revised C4/Gopher quality filters, and Thai-trained content filters, plus curated non-web sources such as Wikipedia, Royal Gazette texts, OCR-extracted books, and CC-licensed YouTube subtitles. Systematic ablations using GPT-2 show the pipeline trims CommonCrawl from 202M to 25M documents while raising SEA-HELM NLG from 3 to 11; an 8B-parameter SEA-LION model continually pre-trained on Mangosteen then surpasses SEA-LION-v3 and Llama-3.1 by about four points on Thai benchmarks. We release the full pipeline code, cleaning manifests, corpus snapshot, and all checkpoints, providing a fully reproducible foundation for future Thai and regional LLM research.

Recently, there have been significant advancements in large language models (LLMs), particularly focused on the English language. These advancements have enabled these LLMs to understand and execute complex instructions with unprecedented accuracy and fluency. However, despite these advancements, there remains a noticeable gap in the development of Chinese instruction tuning. The unique linguistic features and cultural depth of the Chinese language pose challenges for instruction tuning tasks. Existing datasets are either derived from English-centric LLMs or are ill-suited for aligning with the interaction patterns of real-world Chinese users. To bridge this gap, we introduce COIG-CQIA, a high-quality Chinese instruction tuning dataset. Our aim is to build a diverse, wide-ranging instruction-tuning dataset to better align model behavior with human interactions. To this end, we collect a high-quality human-written corpus from various sources on the Chinese Internet, including Q&A communities, Wikis, examinations, and existing NLP datasets. This corpus was rigorously filtered and carefully processed to form the COIG-CQIA dataset. Furthermore, we train models of various scales on different subsets of CQIA, following in-depth evaluation and analyses. The findings from our experiments offer valuable insights for selecting and developing Chinese instruction-tuning datasets. We also find that models trained on CQIA-Subset achieve competitive results in human assessment as well as knowledge and security benchmarks. Data are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/m-a-p/COIG-CQIA

This report introduces EEVE-Korean-v1.0, a Korean adaptation of large language models that exhibit remarkable capabilities across English and Korean text understanding. Building on recent highly capable but English-centric LLMs, such as SOLAR-10.7B and Phi-2, where non-English texts are inefficiently processed with English-centric tokenizers, we present an efficient and effective vocabulary expansion (EEVE) method, which encompasses parameter freezing and subword initialization. In contrast to previous efforts that believe new embeddings require trillions of training tokens, we show that our method can significantly boost non-English proficiency within just 2 billion tokens. Surpassing most instruction-tuned LLMs on the Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard, as of January 2024, our model EEVE-Korean-10.8B-v1.0 ranks as the leading Korean pre-trained model in the open-source community, according to Hugging Face's leaderboard. We open-source our models on Huggingface to empower the open research community in various languages.

Refusal mechanisms in large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring safety. Recent research has revealed that refusal behavior can be mediated by a single direction in activation space, enabling targeted interventions to bypass refusals. While this is primarily demonstrated in an English-centric context, appropriate refusal behavior is important for any language, but poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the refusal behavior in LLMs across 14 languages using PolyRefuse, a multilingual safety dataset created by translating malicious and benign English prompts into these languages. We uncover the surprising cross-lingual universality of the refusal direction: a vector extracted from English can bypass refusals in other languages with near-perfect effectiveness, without any additional fine-tuning. Even more remarkably, refusal directions derived from any safety-aligned language transfer seamlessly to others. We attribute this transferability to the parallelism of refusal vectors across languages in the embedding space and identify the underlying mechanism behind cross-lingual jailbreaks. These findings provide actionable insights for building more robust multilingual safety defenses and pave the way for a deeper mechanistic understanding of cross-lingual vulnerabilities in LLMs.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable performance in medical licensing exams. However, comprehensive evaluation of LLMs across various healthcare roles, particularly in high-stakes clinical scenarios, remains a challenge. Existing benchmarks are typically text-based, English-centric, and focus primarily on medicines, which limits their ability to assess broader healthcare knowledge and multimodal reasoning. To address these gaps, we introduce KokushiMD-10, the first multimodal benchmark constructed from ten Japanese national healthcare licensing exams. This benchmark spans multiple fields, including Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Pharmacy, and allied health professions. It contains over 11588 real exam questions, incorporating clinical images and expert-annotated rationales to evaluate both textual and visual reasoning. We benchmark over 30 state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and Gemini, across both text and image-based settings. Despite promising results, no model consistently meets passing thresholds across domains, highlighting the ongoing challenges in medical AI. KokushiMD-10 provides a comprehensive and linguistically grounded resource for evaluating and advancing reasoning-centric medical AI across multilingual and multimodal clinical tasks.

We introduce KFinEval-Pilot, a benchmark suite specifically designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) in the Korean financial domain. Addressing the limitations of existing English-centric benchmarks, KFinEval-Pilot comprises over 1,000 curated questions across three critical areas: financial knowledge, legal reasoning, and financial toxicity. The benchmark is constructed through a semi-automated pipeline that combines GPT-4-generated prompts with expert validation to ensure domain relevance and factual accuracy. We evaluate a range of representative LLMs and observe notable performance differences across models, with trade-offs between task accuracy and output safety across different model families. These results highlight persistent challenges in applying LLMs to high-stakes financial applications, particularly in reasoning and safety. Grounded in real-world financial use cases and aligned with the Korean regulatory and linguistic context, KFinEval-Pilot serves as an early diagnostic tool for developing safer and more reliable financial AI systems.

Text-to-image generation advancements have been predominantly English-centric, creating barriers for non-English speakers and perpetuating digital inequities. While existing systems rely on translation pipelines, these introduce semantic drift, computational overhead, and cultural misalignment. We introduce NeoBabel, a novel multilingual image generation framework that sets a new Pareto frontier in performance, efficiency and inclusivity, supporting six languages: English, Chinese, Dutch, French, Hindi, and Persian. The model is trained using a combination of large-scale multilingual pretraining and high-resolution instruction tuning. To evaluate its capabilities, we expand two English-only benchmarks to multilingual equivalents: m-GenEval and m-DPG. NeoBabel achieves state-of-the-art multilingual performance while retaining strong English capability, scoring 0.75 on m-GenEval and 0.68 on m-DPG. Notably, it performs on par with leading models on English tasks while outperforming them by +0.11 and +0.09 on multilingual benchmarks, even though these models are built on multilingual base LLMs. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our targeted alignment training for preserving and extending crosslingual generalization. We further introduce two new metrics to rigorously assess multilingual alignment and robustness to code-mixed prompts. Notably, NeoBabel matches or exceeds English-only models while being 2-4x smaller. We release an open toolkit, including all code, model checkpoints, a curated dataset of 124M multilingual text-image pairs, and standardized multilingual evaluation protocols, to advance inclusive AI research. Our work demonstrates that multilingual capability is not a trade-off but a catalyst for improved robustness, efficiency, and cultural fidelity in generative AI.

The landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains predominantly English-centric, resulting in a significant performance gap for other major languages, such as French, especially in the context of Small Language Models (SLMs). Existing multilingual models demonstrate considerably lower performance in French compared to English, and research on efficient adaptation methods for French remains limited. To address this, we introduce Luth, a family of French-specialized SLMs: through targeted post-training on curated, high-quality French data, our models outperform all open-source counterparts of comparable size on multiple French benchmarks while retaining their original English capabilities. We further show that strategic model merging enhances performance in both languages, establishing Luth as a new state of the art for French SLMs and a robust baseline for future French-language research.

While Ukrainian NLP has seen progress in many texts processing tasks, emotion classification remains an underexplored area with no publicly available benchmark to date. In this work, we introduce EmoBench-UA, the first annotated dataset for emotion detection in Ukrainian texts. Our annotation schema is adapted from the previous English-centric works on emotion detection (Mohammad et al., 2018; Mohammad, 2022) guidelines. The dataset was created through crowdsourcing using the Toloka.ai platform ensuring high-quality of the annotation process. Then, we evaluate a range of approaches on the collected dataset, starting from linguistic-based baselines, synthetic data translated from English, to large language models (LLMs). Our findings highlight the challenges of emotion classification in non-mainstream languages like Ukrainian and emphasize the need for further development of Ukrainian-specific models and training resources.

Physical commonsense reasoning datasets like PIQA are predominantly English-centric and lack cultural diversity. We introduce Ko-PIQA, a Korean physical commonsense reasoning dataset that incorporates cultural context. Starting from 3.01 million web-crawled questions, we employed a multi-stage filtering approach using three language models to identify 11,553 PIQA-style questions. Through GPT-4o refinement and human validation, we obtained 441 high-quality question-answer pairs. A key feature of Ko-PIQA is its cultural grounding: 19.7\% of questions contain culturally specific elements like traditional Korean foods (kimchi), clothing (hanbok), and specialized appliances (kimchi refrigerators) that require culturally-aware reasoning beyond direct translation. We evaluate seven language models on Ko-PIQA, with the best model achieving 83.22\% accuracy while the weakest reaches only 59.86\%, demonstrating significant room for improvement. Models particularly struggle with culturally specific scenarios, highlighting the importance of culturally diverse datasets. Ko-PIQA serves as both a benchmark for Korean language models and a foundation for more inclusive commonsense reasoning research. The dataset and code will be publicly available.

In the rapidly evolving digital era, there is an increasing demand for concise information as individuals seek to distil key insights from various sources. Recent attention from researchers on Multi-document Summarisation (MDS) has resulted in diverse datasets covering customer reviews, academic papers, medical and legal documents, and news articles. However, the English-centric nature of these datasets has created a conspicuous void for multilingual datasets in today's globalised digital landscape, where linguistic diversity is celebrated. Media platforms such as British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have disseminated news in 20+ languages for decades. With only 380 million people speaking English natively as their first language, accounting for less than 5% of the global population, the vast majority primarily relies on other languages. These facts underscore the need for inclusivity in MDS research, utilising resources from diverse languages. Recognising this gap, we present the Multilingual Dataset for Multi-document Summarisation (M2DS), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first dataset of its kind. It includes document-summary pairs in five languages from BBC articles published during the 2010-2023 period. This paper introduces M2DS, emphasising its unique multilingual aspect, and includes baseline scores from state-of-the-art MDS models evaluated on our dataset.

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing. Yet, their predominantly English-centric training has led to biases and performance disparities across languages. This imbalance marginalizes minoritized languages, making equitable access to NLP technologies more difficult for languages with lower resources, such as Galician. We present the first two generative LLMs focused on Galician to bridge this gap. These models, freely available as open-source resources, were trained using a GPT architecture with 1.3B parameters on a corpus of 2.1B words. Leveraging continual pretraining, we adapt to Galician two existing LLMs trained on larger corpora, thus mitigating the data constraints that would arise if the training were performed from scratch. The models were evaluated using human judgments and task-based datasets from standardized benchmarks. These evaluations reveal a promising performance, underscoring the importance of linguistic diversity in generative models.

Despite the widespread adoption of Large language models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities remain limited to a few high-resource languages. Additionally, many low-resource languages (e.g. African languages) are often evaluated only on basic text classification tasks due to the lack of appropriate or comprehensive benchmarks outside of high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce IrokoBench -- a human-translated benchmark dataset for 16 typologically-diverse low-resource African languages covering three tasks: natural language inference~(AfriXNLI), mathematical reasoning~(AfriMGSM), and multi-choice knowledge-based QA~(AfriMMLU). We use IrokoBench to evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and translate-test settings~(where test sets are translated into English) across 10 open and four proprietary LLMs. Our evaluation reveals a significant performance gap between high-resource languages~(such as English and French) and low-resource African languages. We observe a significant performance gap between open and proprietary models, with the highest performing open model, Aya-101 only at 58\% of the best-performing proprietary model GPT-4o performance. Machine translating the test set to English before evaluation helped to close the gap for larger models that are English-centric, like LLaMa 3 70B. These findings suggest that more efforts are needed to develop and adapt LLMs for African languages.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong multilingual capabilities; yet, they are mostly English-centric due to the imbalanced training corpora. Existing works leverage this phenomenon to improve their multilingual performances on NLP tasks. In this work, we extend the evaluation from NLP tasks to real user queries. We find that even though translation into English can help improve the performance of multilingual NLP tasks for English-centric LLMs, it may not be optimal for all scenarios. For culture-related tasks that need deep language understanding, prompting in the native language proves to be more promising since it can capture the nuances related to culture and language. Therefore, we advocate for more efforts towards the development of strong multilingual LLMs instead of just English-centric LLMs.

The recent advances in natural language processing have predominantly favored well-resourced English-centric models, resulting in a significant gap with low-resource languages. In this work, we introduce the language model TURNA, which is developed for the low-resource language Turkish and is capable of both natural language understanding and generation tasks. TURNA is pretrained with an encoder-decoder architecture based on the unified framework UL2 with a diverse corpus that we specifically curated for this purpose. We evaluated TURNA with three generation tasks and five understanding tasks for Turkish. The results show that TURNA outperforms several multilingual models in both understanding and generation tasks, and competes with monolingual Turkish models in understanding tasks. TURNA is made available at https://huggingface.co/boun-tabi-LMG/TURNA .

We present Belebele, a multiple-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset spanning 122 language variants. Significantly expanding the language coverage of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks, this dataset enables the evaluation of text models in high-, medium-, and low-resource languages. Each question is based on a short passage from the Flores-200 dataset and has four multiple-choice answers. The questions were carefully curated to discriminate between models with different levels of general language comprehension. The English dataset on its own proves difficult enough to challenge state-of-the-art language models. Being fully parallel, this dataset enables direct comparison of model performance across all languages. We use this dataset to evaluate the capabilities of multilingual masked language models (MLMs) and large language models (LLMs). We present extensive results and find that despite significant cross-lingual transfer in English-centric LLMs, much smaller MLMs pretrained on balanced multilingual data still understand far more languages. We also observe that larger vocabulary size and conscious vocabulary construction correlate with better performance on low-resource languages. Overall, Belebele opens up new avenues for evaluating and analyzing the multilingual capabilities of NLP systems.

External tool integration through function-calling is essential for practical language model applications, yet most multilingual models lack reliable tool-use capabilities in non-English languages. Even state-of-the-art multilingual models struggle with determining when to use tools and generating the structured outputs required for function calls, often exhibiting language confusion when prompted in lower-resource languages. This work presents a methodology for adapting existing language models to enable robust tool use in any target language, using Bulgarian as a case study. The approach involves continued training of the BgGPT model series (2.6B, 9B, 27B parameters) on a novel bilingual dataset of 10,035 function-calling examples designed to support standardized protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol). The research introduces TUCAN (Tool-Using Capable Assistant Navigator), which achieves up to 28.75% improvement in function-calling accuracy over base models while preserving core language understanding, as verified on established Bulgarian benchmarks. Beyond accuracy gains, TUCAN models demonstrate production-ready response formatting with clean, parsable function calls, contrasting with the verbose and inconsistent outputs of base models. The models, evaluation framework, and dataset are released to enable replication for other languages. This work demonstrates a practical approach for extending tool-augmented capabilities beyond English-centric systems.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a crucial task in information extraction and sentiment analysis, aiming to identify aspects with associated sentiment elements in text. However, existing ABSA datasets are predominantly English-centric, limiting the scope for multilingual evaluation and research. To bridge this gap, we present M-ABSA, a comprehensive dataset spanning 7 domains and 21 languages, making it the most extensive multilingual parallel dataset for ABSA to date. Our primary focus is on triplet extraction, which involves identifying aspect terms, aspect categories, and sentiment polarities. The dataset is constructed through an automatic translation process with human review to ensure quality. We perform extensive experiments using various baselines to assess performance and compatibility on M-ABSA. Our empirical findings highlight that the dataset enables diverse evaluation tasks, such as multilingual and multi-domain transfer learning, and large language model evaluation, underscoring its inclusivity and its potential to drive advancements in multilingual ABSA research.

Charts are a universally adopted medium for interpreting and communicating data. However, existing chart understanding benchmarks are predominantly English-centric, limiting their accessibility and applicability to global audiences. In this paper, we present PolyChartQA, the first large-scale multilingual chart question answering benchmark covering 22,606 charts and 26,151 question-answering pairs across 10 diverse languages. PolyChartQA is built using a decoupled pipeline that separates chart data from rendering code, allowing multilingual charts to be flexibly generated by simply translating the data and reusing the code. We leverage state-of-the-art LLM-based translation and enforce rigorous quality control in the pipeline to ensure the linguistic and semantic consistency of the generated multilingual charts. PolyChartQA facilitates systematic evaluation of multilingual chart understanding. Experiments on both open- and closed-source large vision-language models reveal a significant performance gap between English and other languages, especially low-resource ones with non-Latin scripts. This benchmark lays a foundation for advancing globally inclusive vision-language models.

In this paper, we introduce SCALE, a collaborative framework that connects compact Specialized Translation Models (STMs) and general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) as one unified translation engine. By introducing translation from STM into the triplet in-context demonstrations, SCALE unlocks refinement and pivoting ability of LLM, thus mitigating language bias of LLM and parallel data bias of STM, enhancing LLM speciality without sacrificing generality, and facilitating continual learning without expensive LLM fine-tuning. Our comprehensive experiments show that SCALE significantly outperforms both few-shot LLMs (GPT-4) and specialized models (NLLB) in challenging low-resource settings. Moreover, in Xhosa to English translation, SCALE experiences consistent improvement by a 4 BLEURT score without tuning LLM and surpasses few-shot GPT-4 by 2.5 COMET score and 3.8 BLEURT score when equipped with a compact model consisting of merely 600M parameters. SCALE could also effectively exploit the existing language bias of LLMs by using an English-centric STM as a pivot for translation between any language pairs, outperforming few-shot GPT-4 by an average of 6 COMET points across eight translation directions. Furthermore we provide an in-depth analysis of SCALE's robustness, translation characteristics, and latency costs, providing solid foundation for future studies exploring the potential synergy between LLMs and more specialized, task-specific models.

This paper introduces Fietje, a family of small language models (SLMs) specifically designed for the Dutch language. The model is based on Phi 2, an English-centric model of 2.7 billion parameters. Fietje demonstrated competitive results with larger language models upon its release. A core emphasis of this work is transparency and reproducibility: Fietje is fully open-source, with model weights, datasets, training, and evaluation code all publicly accessible. The paper discusses the performance of Fietje and many other models on an extensive evaluation suite of benchmarks on reasoning, sentiment analysis, world knowledge, linguistic acceptability and word sense disambiguation. Evaluation results illustrate the rapid progress in the field of LLMs, where recent small models outperform older, larger models that were fine-tuned for Dutch. This trend signals an exciting future for Dutch language processing, suggesting that even compact LLMs are becoming increasingly capable. Furthermore, ongoing and future efforts to adapt LLMs to Dutch are poised to enhance these models even further, broadening their applicability and accessibility. Fietje is only an intermediate step in improving accessibility to language technology for users of the Dutch language.

Language models have rapidly evolved, predominantly focusing on English while often neglecting extensive pretraining in other languages. This approach has required initiatives to adapt powerful, English-centric models to other linguistic contexts through finetuning. For Dutch, such a recent endeavour is ``GEITje'' a model originally derived from the English-based Mistral 7B. Building on this fundamental work, the current research extends the capabilities of GEITje by supervised finetuning on newly created high-quality synthetic conversational datasets, along with an additional preference alignment procedure on a synthetic feedback dataset. Both the developed models and the created datasets are openly available.

In the ongoing wave of impact driven by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, the adaptation of LLMs to medical domain has emerged as a crucial research frontier. Since mainstream LLMs tend to be designed for general-purpose applications, constructing a medical LLM through domain adaptation is a huge challenge. While instruction-tuning is used to fine-tune some LLMs, its precise roles in domain adaptation remain unknown. Here we show the contribution of LoRA-based instruction-tuning to performance in Japanese medical question-answering tasks. In doing so, we employ a multifaceted evaluation for multiple-choice questions, including scoring based on "Exact match" and "Gestalt distance" in addition to the conventional accuracy. Our findings suggest that LoRA-based instruction-tuning can partially incorporate domain-specific knowledge into LLMs, with larger models demonstrating more pronounced effects. Furthermore, our results underscore the potential of adapting English-centric models for Japanese applications in domain adaptation, while also highlighting the persisting limitations of Japanese-centric models. This initiative represents a pioneering effort in enabling medical institutions to fine-tune and operate models without relying on external services.

Since the rise of large language models (LLMs), the domain adaptation has been one of the hot topics in various domains. Many medical LLMs trained with English medical dataset have made public recently. However, Japanese LLMs in medical domain still lack its research. Here we utilize multiple 70B-parameter LLMs for the first time and show that instruction tuning using Japanese medical question-answering dataset significantly improves the ability of Japanese LLMs to solve Japanese medical license exams, surpassing 50\% in accuracy. In particular, the Japanese-centric models exhibit a more significant leap in improvement through instruction tuning compared to their English-centric counterparts. This underscores the importance of continual pretraining and the adjustment of the tokenizer in our local language. We also examine two slightly different prompt formats, resulting in non-negligible performance improvement.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive language capabilities. However, most of the existing LLMs are all English-centric, which have very unstable and unbalanced performance across different languages. Multilingual alignment is an effective method to enhance the LLMs' multilingual capabilities. In this work, we explore the multilingual alignment paradigm which utilizes translation data and comprehensively investigate the spontaneous multilingual improvement of LLMs. We find that LLMs only instruction-tuned on question translation data without annotated answers are able to get significant multilingual performance enhancement even across a wide range of languages unseen during instruction-tuning. Additionally, we utilize different settings and mechanistic interpretability methods to comprehensively analyze the LLM's performance in the multilingual scenario.

The development of state-of-the-art generative large language models (LLMs) disproportionately relies on English-centric tokenizers, vocabulary and pre-training data. Despite the fact that some LLMs have multilingual capabilities, recent studies have shown that their inference efficiency deteriorates when generating text in languages other than English. This results in increased inference time and costs. Cross-lingual vocabulary adaptation methods have been proposed for adapting models to a target language aiming to improve downstream performance. However, the effectiveness of these methods on increasing inference efficiency of generative LLMs has yet to be explored. In this paper, we perform an empirical study of various cross-lingual vocabulary adaptation methods on five generative LLMs (including monolingual and multilingual models) across four typologically-diverse languages and four natural language understanding tasks. We find that cross-lingual vocabulary adaptation substantially contributes to LLM inference speedups of up to 271.5%. We also show that adapting LLMs that have been pre-trained on more balanced multilingual data results in downstream performance comparable to the original models.

Recent years have witnessed a significant interest in developing large multimodal models (LMMs) capable of performing various visual reasoning and understanding tasks. This has led to the introduction of multiple LMM benchmarks to evaluate LMMs on different tasks. However, most existing LMM evaluation benchmarks are predominantly English-centric. In this work, we develop a comprehensive LMM evaluation benchmark for the Arabic language to represent a large population of over 400 million speakers. The proposed benchmark, named CAMEL-Bench, comprises eight diverse domains and 38 sub-domains including, multi-image understanding, complex visual perception, handwritten document understanding, video understanding, medical imaging, plant diseases, and remote sensing-based land use understanding to evaluate broad scenario generalizability. Our CAMEL-Bench comprises around 29,036 questions that are filtered from a larger pool of samples, where the quality is manually verified by native speakers to ensure reliable model assessment. We conduct evaluations of both closed-source, including GPT-4 series, and open-source LMMs. Our analysis reveals the need for substantial improvement, especially among the best open-source models, with even the closed-source GPT-4o achieving an overall score of 62%. Our benchmark and evaluation scripts are open-sourced.

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) like GPT-4V has marked a significant step towards artificial general intelligence. Existing methods mainly focus on aligning vision encoders with LLMs through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to endow LLMs with multimodal abilities, making MLLMs' inherent ability to react to multiple languages progressively deteriorate as the training process evolves. We empirically find that the imbalanced SFT datasets, primarily composed of English-centric image-text pairs, lead to significantly reduced performance in non-English languages. This is due to the failure of aligning the vision encoder and LLM with multilingual tokens during the SFT process. In this paper, we introduce Parrot, a novel method that utilizes textual guidance to drive visual token alignment at the language level. Parrot makes the visual tokens condition on diverse language inputs and uses Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to promote the alignment of multilingual tokens. Specifically, to enhance non-English visual tokens alignment, we compute the cross-attention using the initial visual features and textual embeddings, the result of which is then fed into the MoE router to select the most relevant experts. The selected experts subsequently convert the initial visual tokens into language-specific visual tokens. Moreover, considering the current lack of benchmarks for evaluating multilingual capabilities within the field, we collect and make available a Massive Multilingual Multimodal Benchmark which includes 6 languages, 15 categories, and 12,000 questions, named as MMMB. Our method not only demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on multilingual MMBench and MMMB, but also excels across a broad range of multimodal tasks. Both the source code and the training dataset of Parrot will be made publicly available.

This paper investigates data selection and model merging methodologies aimed at incorporating advanced reasoning capabilities such as those of DeepSeek R1 into language-specific large language models (LLMs), with a particular focus on the Thai LLM. Our goal is to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language-specific LLMs while maintaining their target language abilities. DeepSeek R1 excels in reasoning but primarily benefits high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. However, low-resource languages remain underserved due to the dominance of English-centric training data and model optimizations, which limit performance in these languages. This limitation results in unreliable code-switching and diminished effectiveness on tasks in low-resource languages. Meanwhile, local and regional LLM initiatives have attempted to bridge this gap by developing language-specific LLMs that focus on improving local linguistic fidelity. We demonstrate that, with only publicly available datasets and a computational budget of $120, it is possible to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language-specific LLMs to match the level of DeepSeek R1, without compromising their performance on target language tasks.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the need for evaluation frameworks that go beyond English centric benchmarks and address the requirements of linguistically diverse regions such as India. We present EKA-EVAL, a unified and production-ready evaluation framework that integrates over 35 benchmarks, including 10 Indic-specific datasets, spanning categories like reasoning, mathematics, tool use, long-context understanding, and reading comprehension. Compared to existing Indian language evaluation tools, EKA-EVAL offers broader benchmark coverage, with built-in support for distributed inference, quantization, and multi-GPU usage. Our systematic comparison positions EKA-EVAL as the first end-to-end, extensible evaluation suite tailored for both global and Indic LLMs, significantly lowering the barrier to multilingual benchmarking. The framework is open-source and publicly available at https://github.com/lingo-iitgn/ eka-eval and a part of ongoing EKA initiative (https://eka.soket.ai), which aims to scale up to over 100 benchmarks and establish a robust, multilingual evaluation ecosystem for LLMs.

Recent advancements in Reinforcement Post-Training (RPT) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), sparking increased interest in the generalization of RL-based reasoning. While existing work has primarily focused on investigating its generalization across tasks or modalities, this study proposes a novel cross-linguistic perspective to investigate reasoning generalization. This raises a crucial question: Does the reasoning capability achieved from English RPT effectively transfer to other languages? We address this by systematically evaluating English-centric LRMs on multilingual reasoning benchmarks and introducing a metric to quantify cross-lingual transferability. Our findings reveal that cross-lingual transferability varies significantly across initial model, target language, and training paradigm. Through interventional studies, we find that models with stronger initial English capabilities tend to over-rely on English-specific patterns, leading to diminished cross-lingual generalization. To address this, we conduct a thorough parallel training study. Experimental results yield three key findings: First-Parallel Leap, a substantial leap in performance when transitioning from monolingual to just a single parallel language, and a predictable Parallel Scaling Law, revealing that cross-lingual reasoning transfer follows a power-law with the number of training parallel languages. Moreover, we identify the discrepancy between actual monolingual performance and the power-law prediction as Monolingual Generalization Gap, indicating that English-centric LRMs fail to fully generalize across languages. Our study challenges the assumption that LRM reasoning mirrors human cognition, providing critical insights for the development of more language-agnostic LRMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have inherent limitations of faithfulness and factuality, commonly referred to as hallucinations. Several benchmarks have been developed that provide a test bed for factuality evaluation within the context of English-centric datasets, while relying on supplementary informative context like web links or text passages but ignoring the available structured factual resources. To this end, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have been identified as a useful aid for hallucination mitigation, as they provide a structured way to represent the facts about entities and their relations with minimal linguistic overhead. We bridge the lack of KG paths and multilinguality for factual language modeling within the existing hallucination evaluation benchmarks and propose a KG-based multilingual, multihop benchmark called MultiHal framed for generative text evaluation. As part of our data collection pipeline, we mined 140k KG-paths from open-domain KGs, from which we pruned noisy KG-paths, curating a high-quality subset of 25.9k. Our baseline evaluation shows an absolute scale increase by approximately 0.12 to 0.36 points for the semantic similarity score in KG-RAG over vanilla QA across multiple languages and multiple models, demonstrating the potential of KG integration. We anticipate MultiHal will foster future research towards several graph-based hallucination mitigation and fact-checking tasks.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have undergone a rapid evolution, giving rise to significant advancements in the realm of multimodal understanding tasks. However, the majority of these models are trained and evaluated on English-centric datasets, leaving a gap in the development and evaluation of VLMs for other languages, such as Japanese. This gap can be attributed to the lack of methodologies for constructing VLMs and the absence of benchmarks to accurately measure their performance. To address this issue, we introduce a novel benchmark, Japanese Heron-Bench, for evaluating Japanese capabilities of VLMs. The Japanese Heron-Bench consists of a variety of imagequestion answer pairs tailored to the Japanese context. Additionally, we present a baseline Japanese VLM that has been trained with Japanese visual instruction tuning datasets. Our Heron-Bench reveals the strengths and limitations of the proposed VLM across various ability dimensions. Furthermore, we clarify the capability gap between strong closed models like GPT-4V and the baseline model, providing valuable insights for future research in this domain. We release the benchmark dataset and training code to facilitate further developments in Japanese VLM research.

Despite significant advances in vision-language models (VLMs), most existing work follows an English-centric design process, limiting their effectiveness in multilingual settings. In this work, we provide a comprehensive empirical study analyzing the impact of several multilingual design choices, such as training data composition, encoder selection, and text backbones. The result is TowerVision, a family of open multilingual VLMs for both image-text and video-text tasks, built upon the multilingual text-only model Tower+. TowerVision achieves competitive performance on multiple multimodal multilingual benchmarks and shows particular strength in culturally grounded tasks and multimodal translation. By incorporating visual and cultural context during fine-tuning, our models surpass existing approaches trained on substantially larger datasets, as demonstrated on ALM-Bench and Multi30K (image tasks) and ViMUL-Bench (video tasks). Alongside the models, we release VisionBlocks, a high-quality, curated vision-language dataset. Our findings highlight that multilingual vision-language training data substantially improves cross-lingual generalization -- both from high-resource to underrepresented languages and vice versa -- and that instruction-tuned LLMs are not always the optimal initialization point. To support further research, we publicly release all models, data, and training recipes.

Adapting large language models to other languages typically employs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a standard approach. However, it often suffers from an overemphasis on English performance, a phenomenon that is especially pronounced in data-constrained environments. To overcome these challenges, we propose Cross-Lingual Optimization (CLO) that efficiently transfers an English-centric LLM to a target language while preserving its English capabilities. CLO utilizes publicly available English SFT data and a translation model to enable cross-lingual transfer. We conduct experiments using five models on six languages, each possessing varying levels of resource. Our results show that CLO consistently outperforms SFT in both acquiring target language proficiency and maintaining English performance. Remarkably, in low-resource languages, CLO with only 3,200 samples surpasses SFT with 6,400 samples, demonstrating that CLO can achieve better performance with less data. Furthermore, we find that SFT is particularly sensitive to data quantity in medium and low-resource languages, whereas CLO remains robust. Our comprehensive analysis emphasizes the limitations of SFT and incorporates additional training strategies in CLO to enhance efficiency.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have dominated much of the artificial intelligence scene with their ability to process and generate natural languages. However, the majority of LLM research and development remains English-centric, leaving low-resource languages such as those in the Southeast Asian (SEA) region under-represented. To address this representation gap, we introduce Llama-SEA-LION-v3-8B-IT and Gemma-SEA-LION-v3-9B-IT, two cutting-edge multilingual LLMs designed for SEA languages. The SEA-LION family of LLMs supports 11 SEA languages, namely English, Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Malay, Thai, Burmese, Lao, Filipino, Tamil, and Khmer. Our work leverages large-scale multilingual continued pre-training with a comprehensive post-training regime involving multiple stages of instruction fine-tuning, alignment, and model merging. Evaluation results on multilingual benchmarks indicate that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance across LLMs supporting SEA languages. We open-source the models to benefit the wider SEA community.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, but their English-centric training data limits performance in non-English languages, highlighting the need for enhancements in their multilingual capabilities. While some work on multilingual prompting methods handles non-English queries by utilizing English translations or restructuring them to more closely align with LLM reasoning patterns, these works often overlook the importance of cultural context, limiting their effectiveness. To address this limitation, we propose EMCEI, a simple yet effective approach that improves LLMs' multilingual capabilities by incorporating cultural context for more accurate and appropriate responses. Specifically, EMCEI follows a two-step process that first extracts relevant cultural context from the LLM's parametric knowledge via prompting. Then, EMCEI employs an LLM-as-Judge mechanism to select the most appropriate response by balancing cultural relevance and reasoning ability. Experiments on diverse multilingual benchmarks show that EMCEI outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling multilingual queries with LLMs.

Large language models predominantly reflect Western cultures, largely due to the dominance of English-centric training data. This imbalance presents a significant challenge, as LLMs are increasingly used across diverse contexts without adequate evaluation of their cultural competence in non-English languages, including Persian. To address this gap, we introduce PerCul, a carefully constructed dataset designed to assess the sensitivity of LLMs toward Persian culture. PerCul features story-based, multiple-choice questions that capture culturally nuanced scenarios. Unlike existing benchmarks, PerCul is curated with input from native Persian annotators to ensure authenticity and to prevent the use of translation as a shortcut. We evaluate several state-of-the-art multilingual and Persian-specific LLMs, establishing a foundation for future research in cross-cultural NLP evaluation. Our experiments demonstrate a 11.3% gap between best closed source model and layperson baseline while the gap increases to 21.3% by using the best open-weight model. You can access the dataset from here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/teias-ai/percul

As current training data for Large Language Models (LLMs) are dominated by English corpus, they are English-centric and they present impressive performance on English reasoning tasks.This paper primarily studies English-centric models, but our method could be universal by using the centric language in the dictionary for non-English-centric LLMs. Yet, they usually suffer from lower performance in other languages. There are about 7,000 languages over the world, and many are low-resourced on English-centric LLMs. For the sake of people who primarily speak these languages, it is especially urgent to enable our LLMs in those languages. Model training is usually effective, but computationally expensive and requires experienced NLP practitioners. This paper presents a novel and simple yet effective method called Dictionary Insertion Prompting (DIP). When providing a non-English prompt, DIP looks up a word dictionary and inserts words' English counterparts into the prompt for LLMs. It then enables better translation into English and better English model thinking steps which leads to obviously better results. We experiment with about 200 languages from FLORES-200. Since there are no adequate datasets, we use the NLLB translator to create synthetic multilingual benchmarks from the existing 4 English reasoning benchmarks such as GSM8K and AQuA. Despite the simplicity and computationally lightweight, we surprisingly found the effectiveness of DIP on math and commonsense reasoning tasks on multiple open-source and close-source LLMs.Our dictionaries, code, and synthetic benchmarks will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

Large language models demonstrate reasonable multilingual abilities, despite predominantly English-centric pretraining. However, the spontaneous multilingual alignment in these models is shown to be weak, leading to unsatisfactory cross-lingual transfer and knowledge sharing. Previous works attempt to address this issue by explicitly injecting multilingual alignment information during or after pretraining. Thus for the early stage in pretraining, the alignment is weak for sharing information or knowledge across languages. In this paper, we propose PreAlign, a framework that establishes multilingual alignment prior to language model pretraining. PreAlign injects multilingual alignment by initializing the model to generate similar representations of aligned words and preserves this alignment using a code-switching strategy during pretraining. Extensive experiments in a synthetic English to English-Clone setting demonstrate that PreAlign significantly outperforms standard multilingual joint training in language modeling, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, and cross-lingual knowledge application. Further experiments in real-world scenarios further validate PreAlign's effectiveness across various model sizes.

As recent multi-modality large language models (MLLMs) have shown formidable proficiency on various complex tasks, there has been increasing attention on debating whether these models could eventually mirror human intelligence. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating solely on task performance, such as the accuracy of identifying the attribute of an object. Combining well-developed cognitive science to understand the intelligence of MLLMs beyond superficial achievements remains largely unexplored. To this end, we introduce the first cognitive-driven multi-lingual and multi-modal benchmark to evaluate the general intelligence ability of MLLMs, dubbed M3GIA. Specifically, we identify five key cognitive factors based on the well-recognized Cattell-Horn-Carrol (CHC) model of intelligence and propose a novel evaluation metric. In addition, since most MLLMs are trained to perform in different languages, a natural question arises: is language a key factor influencing the cognitive ability of MLLMs? As such, we go beyond English to encompass other languages based on their popularity, including Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean, to construct our M3GIA. We make sure all the data relevant to the cultural backgrounds are collected from their native context to avoid English-centric bias. We collected a significant corpus of data from human participants, revealing that the most advanced MLLM reaches the lower boundary of human intelligence in English. Yet, there remains a pronounced disparity in the other five languages assessed. We also reveals an interesting winner takes all phenomenon that are aligned with the discovery in cognitive studies. Our benchmark will be open-sourced, with the aspiration of facilitating the enhancement of cognitive capabilities in MLLMs.

Numerous datasets have been proposed to combat the spread of online hate. Despite these efforts, a majority of these resources are English-centric, primarily focusing on overt forms of hate. This research gap calls for developing high-quality corpora in diverse languages that also encapsulate more subtle hate expressions. This study introduces K-HATERS, a new corpus for hate speech detection in Korean, comprising approximately 192K news comments with target-specific offensiveness ratings. This resource is the largest offensive language corpus in Korean and is the first to offer target-specific ratings on a three-point Likert scale, enabling the detection of hate expressions in Korean across varying degrees of offensiveness. We conduct experiments showing the effectiveness of the proposed corpus, including a comparison with existing datasets. Additionally, to address potential noise and bias in human annotations, we explore a novel idea of adopting the Cognitive Reflection Test, which is widely used in social science for assessing an individual's cognitive ability, as a proxy of labeling quality. Findings indicate that annotations from individuals with the lowest test scores tend to yield detection models that make biased predictions toward specific target groups and are less accurate. This study contributes to the NLP research on hate speech detection and resource construction. The code and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/ssu-humane/K-HATERS.

We present Samanantar, the largest publicly available parallel corpora collection for Indic languages. The collection contains a total of 49.7 million sentence pairs between English and 11 Indic languages (from two language families). Specifically, we compile 12.4 million sentence pairs from existing, publicly-available parallel corpora, and additionally mine 37.4 million sentence pairs from the web, resulting in a 4x increase. We mine the parallel sentences from the web by combining many corpora, tools, and methods: (a) web-crawled monolingual corpora, (b) document OCR for extracting sentences from scanned documents, (c) multilingual representation models for aligning sentences, and (d) approximate nearest neighbor search for searching in a large collection of sentences. Human evaluation of samples from the newly mined corpora validate the high quality of the parallel sentences across 11 languages. Further, we extract 83.4 million sentence pairs between all 55 Indic language pairs from the English-centric parallel corpus using English as the pivot language. We trained multilingual NMT models spanning all these languages on Samanantar, which outperform existing models and baselines on publicly available benchmarks, such as FLORES, establishing the utility of Samanantar. Our data and models are available publicly at https://indicnlp.ai4bharat.org/samanantar/ and we hope they will help advance research in NMT and multilingual NLP for Indic languages.

Language models are increasingly used in Brazil, but most evaluation remains English-centric. This paper presents Alvorada-Bench, a 4,515-question, text-only benchmark drawn from five Brazilian university entrance examinations. Evaluating twenty models under zero-shot, role-playing, and chain-of-thought prompting, producing 270,900 responses with structured self-reports of confidence, perceived difficulty, and Bloom level. The top models exceed 94% accuracy overall, but accuracy declines on Mathematics and on the engineering oriented IME and ITA exams, indicating persistent weaknesses in multi-step reasoning. Confidence is well calibrated and correlates with perceived difficulty, revealing that models can accurately assess their own certainty capabilities. A cost accuracy analysis shows that high accuracy is achievable at under $2 per 1K tokens. On ENEM 2024 the top model (O3) achieved perfect scores in Languages subject questions while even the weakest system (GPT-4.1 Nano) only underperforms humans in Mathematics. Through exams that distill decades of Brazilian educational priorities and assess millions of students yearly, Alvorada-Bench establishes whether language models can navigate the intersection of language, culture, and reasoning that defines academic readiness in Brazil.

Large language models increasingly support multiple languages, yet most benchmarks for gender bias remain English-centric. We introduce EuroGEST, a dataset designed to measure gender-stereotypical reasoning in LLMs across English and 29 European languages. EuroGEST builds on an existing expert-informed benchmark covering 16 gender stereotypes, expanded in this work using translation tools, quality estimation metrics, and morphological heuristics. Human evaluations confirm that our data generation method results in high accuracy of both translations and gender labels across languages. We use EuroGEST to evaluate 24 multilingual language models from six model families, demonstrating that the strongest stereotypes in all models across all languages are that women are 'beautiful', 'empathetic' and 'neat' and men are 'leaders', 'strong, tough' and 'professional'. We also show that larger models encode gendered stereotypes more strongly and that instruction finetuning does not consistently reduce gendered stereotypes. Our work highlights the need for more multilingual studies of fairness in LLMs and offers scalable methods and resources to audit gender bias across languages.

Language models (LMs) are bound to their tokenizer, which maps raw text to a sequence of vocabulary items (tokens). This restricts their flexibility: for example, LMs trained primarily on English may still perform well in other natural and programming languages, but have vastly decreased efficiency due to their English-centric tokenizer. To mitigate this, we should be able to swap the original LM tokenizer with an arbitrary one, on the fly, without degrading performance. Hence, in this work we define a new problem: Zero-Shot Tokenizer Transfer (ZeTT). The challenge at the core of ZeTT is finding embeddings for the tokens in the vocabulary of the new tokenizer. Since prior heuristics for initializing embeddings often perform at chance level in a ZeTT setting, we propose a new solution: we train a hypernetwork taking a tokenizer as input and predicting the corresponding embeddings. We empirically demonstrate that the hypernetwork generalizes to new tokenizers both with encoder (e.g., XLM-R) and decoder LLMs (e.g., Mistral-7B). Our method comes close to the original models' performance in cross-lingual and coding tasks while markedly reducing the length of the tokenized sequence. We also find that the remaining gap can be quickly closed by continued training on less than 1B tokens. Finally, we show that a ZeTT hypernetwork trained for a base (L)LM can also be applied to fine-tuned variants without extra training. Overall, our results make substantial strides toward detaching LMs from their tokenizer.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the linguistic diversity of LLM safety research, highlighting the English-centric nature of the field. Through a systematic review of nearly 300 publications from 2020--2024 across major NLP conferences and workshops at *ACL, we identify a significant and growing language gap in LLM safety research, with even high-resource non-English languages receiving minimal attention. We further observe that non-English languages are rarely studied as a standalone language and that English safety research exhibits poor language documentation practice. To motivate future research into multilingual safety, we make several recommendations based on our survey, and we then pose three concrete future directions on safety evaluation, training data generation, and crosslingual safety generalization. Based on our survey and proposed directions, the field can develop more robust, inclusive AI safety practices for diverse global populations.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in many languages beyond English. Yet, LLMs require more inference steps when generating non-English text due to their reliance on English-centric tokenizers, vocabulary, and pre-training data, resulting in higher usage costs to non-English speakers. Vocabulary expansion with target language tokens is a widely used cross-lingual vocabulary adaptation approach to remedy this issue. Despite its effectiveness in inference speedup, the majority of previous work has focused on high-resource settings assuming access to a substantial amount of target language data to effectively initialize the embeddings of the new tokens and adapt the LLM to the target language. However, vocabulary expansion for LLMs in low-resource settings (i.e. languages and compute) has yet to be explored. In this paper, we investigate sample-efficient adaptation strategies from different angles, including target vocabulary size and initialization methods, and the amount of target data available for adaptation. Extensive experiments across typologically diverse languages, tasks and models show that simpler heuristic-based embedding initialization is more efficient and robust to changes in target vocabulary size and adaptation data in low-resource settings, outperforming a popular random initialization and a more sophisticated state-of-the-art approach that relies on external data and model.

Large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for global enterprise applications due to substantial performance gaps between high-resource and mid/low-resource languages, driven by English-centric pretraining and internal reasoning biases. This inconsistency undermines customer experience and operational reliability in multilingual settings such as customer support, content moderation, and information retrieval. Even with advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, we observe up to an 29% accuracy drop in non-English languages compared to English. We propose a practical, batch-wise alignment strategy for fine-tuning LLMs, leveraging semantically equivalent multilingual data in each training batch to directly align model outputs across languages. This approach improves non-English accuracy by up to 23.9\% without compromising English performance, model reasoning, or retrieval quality. Our method is simple to implement, scalable, and integrates seamlessly with existing LLM training \& deployment pipelines, enabling more robust and equitable multilingual AI solutions in industry.

In recent years, Large Language Models have revolutionized the field of natural language processing, showcasing an impressive rise predominantly in English-centric domains. These advancements have set a global benchmark, inspiring significant efforts toward developing Arabic LLMs capable of understanding and generating the Arabic language with remarkable accuracy. Despite these advancements, a critical challenge persists: the potential bias in Arabic LLMs, primarily attributed to their reliance on datasets comprising English data that has been translated into Arabic. This reliance not only compromises the authenticity of the generated content but also reflects a broader issue -the scarcity of original quality Arabic linguistic data. This study aims to address the data scarcity in the Arab world and to encourage the development of Arabic Language Models that are true to both the linguistic and nuances of the region. We undertook a large-scale data mining project, extracting a substantial volume of text from the Common Crawl WET files, specifically targeting Arabic content. The extracted data underwent a rigorous cleaning and deduplication process, using innovative techniques to ensure the integrity and uniqueness of the dataset. The result is the 101 Billion Arabic Words Dataset, the largest Arabic dataset available to date, which can significantly contribute to the development of authentic Arabic LLMs. This study not only highlights the potential for creating linguistically and culturally accurate Arabic LLMs but also sets a precedent for future research in enhancing the authenticity of Arabic language models.

As the capabilities of language models continue to advance, it is conceivable that "one-size-fits-all" model will remain as the main paradigm. For instance, given the vast number of languages worldwide, many of which are low-resource, the prevalent practice is to pretrain a single model on multiple languages. In this paper, we add to the growing body of evidence that challenges this practice, demonstrating that monolingual pretraining on the target language significantly improves models already extensively trained on diverse corpora. More specifically, we further pretrain GPT-J and LLaMA models on Portuguese texts using 3% or less of their original pretraining budget. Few-shot evaluations on Poeta, a suite of 14 Portuguese datasets, reveal that our models outperform English-centric and multilingual counterparts by a significant margin. Our best model, Sabi\'a-65B, performs on par with GPT-3.5-turbo. By evaluating on datasets originally conceived in the target language as well as translated ones, we study the contributions of language-specific pretraining in terms of 1) capturing linguistic nuances and structures inherent to the target language, and 2) enriching the model's knowledge about a domain or culture. Our results indicate that the majority of the benefits stem from the domain-specific knowledge acquired through monolingual pretraining.

In the age of misinformation, hallucination -- the tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate non-factual or unfaithful responses -- represents the main risk for their global utility. Despite LLMs becoming increasingly multilingual, the vast majority of research on detecting and quantifying LLM hallucination are (a) English-centric and (b) focus on machine translation (MT) and summarization, tasks that are less common ``in the wild'' than open information seeking. In contrast, we aim to quantify the extent of LLM hallucination across languages in knowledge-intensive long-form question answering. To this end, we train a multilingual hallucination detection model and conduct a large-scale study across 30 languages and 6 open-source LLM families. We start from an English hallucination detection dataset and rely on MT to generate (noisy) training data in other languages. We also manually annotate gold data for five high-resource languages; we then demonstrate, for these languages, that the estimates of hallucination rates are similar between silver (LLM-generated) and gold test sets, validating the use of silver data for estimating hallucination rates for other languages. For the final rates estimation, we build a knowledge-intensive QA dataset for 30 languages with LLM-generated prompts and Wikipedia articles as references. We find that, while LLMs generate longer responses with more hallucinated tokens for higher-resource languages, there is no correlation between length-normalized hallucination rates of languages and their digital representation. Further, we find that smaller LLMs exhibit larger hallucination rates than larger models.

Recent advancements in large language models have facilitated the execution of complex language tasks, not only in English but also in non-English languages. However, the tokenizers of most language models, such as Llama, trained on English-centric corpora, tend to excessively fragment tokens in non-English languages. This issue is especially pronounced in non-roman alphabetic languages, which are often divided at a character or even Unicode level, leading to slower text generation. To address this, our study introduces a novel framework designed to expedite text generation in these languages. This framework predicts larger linguistic units than those of conventional multilingual tokenizers and is specifically tailored to the target language, thereby reducing the number of decoding steps required. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed framework increases the generation speed by a factor of 1.9 compared to standard decoding while maintaining the performance of a pre-trained multilingual model on monolingual tasks.

Recent dense audio-visual (AV) models achieve impressive retrieval and emergent localization, but almost all evidence comes from English-centric, caption-rich web video. It is unclear whether these objectives survive in low-resource, code-switched, and noisy multilingual settings that typify developing regions. We show they do**-**and that the choice of aggregation function becomes even more critical. Using a multilingual subset of Project Vaani spanning dozens of Indian languages and dialectal variants, we compare three contrastive objectives: (i) a global mean-pooled loss (CLIP-style), (ii) a dense max-mean token matcher (DenseAV-style), and (iii) a simple hybrid (motivated by frozen-vision alignment strategies). The dense objective delivers a +59% relative R@1 (Audio Visual) improvement over global pooling and substantially lower mean/median ranks, while consistently producing sharp zero-shot localization heatmaps of spoken objects-despite keeping the vision backbone entirely frozen (no LoRA / partial fine-tuning). Our results demonstrate that dense token routing is not a luxury of high-resource English corpora; it is more decisive when annotations and acoustic cleanliness are scarce. We release the codebase and trained models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful general-purpose reasoning systems, yet their development remains dominated by English-centric data, architectures, and optimization paradigms. This exclusionary design results in structural under-representation of linguistically diverse regions such as India, where over 20 official languages and 100+ dialects coexist alongside phenomena like code-switching and diglossia. We introduce PARAM-1, a 2.9B parameter decoder-only, text-only language model trained from scratch with an explicit architectural and linguistic focus on Indian diversity. PARAM-1 is trained on a bilingual dataset consisting of only Hindi and English, constructed with a strong focus on fact-rich, high-quality content. It is guided by three core principles: equitable representation of Indic languages through a 25% corpus allocation; tokenization fairness via a SentencePiece tokenizer adapted to Indian morphological structures; and culturally aligned evaluation benchmarks across IndicQA, code-mixed reasoning, and socio-linguistic robustness tasks. By embedding diversity at the pretraining level-rather than deferring it to post-hoc alignment-PARAM-1 offers a design-first blueprint for equitable foundation modeling. Our results demonstrate that it serves as both a competent general-purpose model and a robust baseline for India-centric applications.

We investigate the potential of LLM-generated synthetic data for improving low-resource machine translation (MT). Focusing on seven diverse target languages, we construct a document-level synthetic corpus from English Europarl, and extend it via pivoting to 147 additional language pairs. Automatic and human evaluation confirm its high overall quality. We study its practical application by (i) identifying effective training regimes, (ii) comparing our data with the HPLT dataset, and (iii) testing its utility beyond English-centric MT. Finally, we introduce SynOPUS, a public repository for synthetic parallel datasets. Our findings show that LLM-generated synthetic data, even when noisy, can substantially improve MT performance for low-resource languages.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various NLP tasks, yet their focus has predominantly been on English due to English-centric pre-training and limited multilingual data. While some multilingual LLMs claim to support for hundreds of languages, models often fail to provide high-quality response for mid- and low-resource languages, leading to imbalanced performance heavily skewed in favor of high-resource languages like English and Chinese. In this paper, we prioritize quality over scaling number of languages, with a focus on multilingual machine translation task, and introduce X-ALMA, a model designed with a commitment to ensuring top-tier performance across 50 diverse languages, regardless of their resource levels. X-ALMA surpasses state-of-the-art open-source multilingual LLMs, such as Aya-101 and Aya-23, in every single translation direction on the FLORES and WMT'23 test datasets according to COMET-22. This is achieved by plug-and-play language-specific module architecture to prevent language conflicts during training and a carefully designed training regimen with novel optimization methods to maximize the translation performance. At the final stage of training regimen, our proposed Adaptive Rejection Preference Optimization (ARPO) surpasses existing preference optimization methods in translation tasks.

Sentiment analysis serves as a pivotal component in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Advancements in multilingual pre-trained models such as XLM-R and mT5 have contributed to the increasing interest in cross-lingual sentiment analysis. The recent emergence in Large Language Models (LLM) has significantly advanced general NLP tasks, however, the capability of such LLMs in cross-lingual sentiment analysis has not been fully studied. This work undertakes an empirical analysis to compare the cross-lingual transfer capability of public Small Multilingual Language Models (SMLM) like XLM-R, against English-centric LLMs such as Llama-3, in the context of sentiment analysis across English, Spanish, French and Chinese. Our findings reveal that among public models, SMLMs exhibit superior zero-shot cross-lingual performance relative to LLMs. However, in few-shot cross-lingual settings, public LLMs demonstrate an enhanced adaptive potential. In addition, we observe that proprietary GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 lead in zero-shot cross-lingual capability, but are outpaced by public models in few-shot scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) play a central role in modern artificial intelligence, yet their development has been primarily focused on English, resulting in limited support for other languages. We present PLLuM (Polish Large Language Model), the largest open-source family of foundation models tailored specifically for the Polish language. Developed by a consortium of major Polish research institutions, PLLuM addresses the need for high-quality, transparent, and culturally relevant language models beyond the English-centric commercial landscape. We describe the development process, including the construction of a new 140-billion-token Polish text corpus for pre-training, a 77k custom instructions dataset, and a 100k preference optimization dataset. A key component is a Responsible AI framework that incorporates strict data governance and a hybrid module for output correction and safety filtering. We detail the models' architecture, training procedures, and alignment techniques for both base and instruction-tuned variants, and demonstrate their utility in a downstream task within public administration. By releasing these models publicly, PLLuM aims to foster open research and strengthen sovereign AI technologies in Poland.

Multilingual pre-trained models (mPLMs) have shown impressive performance on cross-lingual transfer tasks. However, the transfer performance is often hindered when a low-resource target language is written in a different script than the high-resource source language, even though the two languages may be related or share parts of their vocabularies. Inspired by recent work that uses transliteration to address this problem, our paper proposes a transliteration-based post-pretraining alignment (PPA) method aiming to improve the cross-lingual alignment between languages using diverse scripts. We select two areal language groups, Mediterranean-Amharic-Farsi and South+East Asian Languages, wherein the languages are mutually influenced but use different scripts. We apply our method to these language groups and conduct extensive experiments on a spectrum of downstream tasks. The results show that after PPA, models consistently outperform the original model (up to 50% for some tasks) in English-centric transfer. In addition, when we use languages other than English as sources in transfer, our method obtains even larger improvements. We will make our code and models publicly available at https://github.com/cisnlp/Transliteration-PPA.

LLMs have become a go-to solution not just for text generation, but also for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Acquiring extensive knowledge through language modeling on web-scale corpora, they excel on English NLU, yet struggle to extend their NLU capabilities to underrepresented languages. In contrast, machine translation models (MT) produce excellent multilingual representations, resulting in strong translation performance even for low-resource languages. MT encoders, however, lack the knowledge necessary for comprehensive NLU that LLMs obtain through language modeling training on immense corpora. In this work, we get the best both worlds by integrating MT encoders directly into LLM backbones via sample-efficient self-distillation. The resulting MT-LLMs preserve the inherent multilingual representational alignment from the MT encoder, allowing lower-resource languages to tap into the rich knowledge embedded in English-centric LLMs. Merging the MT encoder and LLM in a single model, we mitigate the propagation of translation errors and inference overhead of MT decoding inherent to discrete translation-based cross-lingual transfer (e.g., translate-test). Evaluation spanning three prominent NLU tasks and 127 predominantly low-resource languages renders MT-LLMs highly effective in cross-lingual transfer. MT-LLMs substantially and consistently outperform translate-test based on the same MT model, showing that we truly unlock multilingual language understanding for LLMs.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into various global cultures fundamentally presents a cultural challenge: LLMs must navigate interactions, respect social norms, and avoid transgressing cultural boundaries. However, it is still unclear if LLMs can adapt their outputs to diverse cultural norms. Our study focuses on this aspect. We introduce NormAd, a novel dataset, which includes 2.6k stories that represent social and cultural norms from 75 countries, to assess the ability of LLMs to adapt to different granular levels of socio-cultural contexts such as the country of origin, its associated cultural values, and prevalent social norms. Our study reveals that LLMs struggle with cultural reasoning across all contextual granularities, showing stronger adaptability to English-centric cultures over those from the Global South. Even with explicit social norms, the top-performing model, Mistral-7b-Instruct, achieves only 81.8\% accuracy, lagging behind the 95.6\% achieved by humans. Evaluation on NormAd further reveals that LLMs struggle to adapt to stories involving gift-giving across cultures. Due to inherent agreement or sycophancy biases, LLMs find it considerably easier to assess the social acceptability of stories that adhere to cultural norms than those that deviate from them. Our benchmark measures the cultural adaptability (or lack thereof) of LLMs, emphasizing the potential to make these technologies more equitable and useful for global audiences. We release the NormAd dataset and its associated code on GitHub.

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly transformed the field of natural language processing, although the focus on English-centric models has created a noticeable research gap for specific languages, including Vietnamese. To address this issue, this paper presents vi-mistral-x, an innovative Large Language Model designed expressly for the Vietnamese language. It utilizes a unique method of continual pre-training, based on the Mistral architecture, which incorporates grouped-query attention and sliding window attention techniques. This model, vi-Mistral-X, marks a significant step forward in improving the understanding and generation of the Vietnamese language. It introduces an additional phase of continual pre-training, specifically adapted for Vietnamese, enhancing the model's capability in understanding complex language nuances and generating accurate, context-aware Vietnamese text. Through comprehensive testing on various benchmarks, vi-mistral-x has shown to outperform existing Vietnamese LLMs in several key areas, including text classification, question answering, and text generation. Particularly, in the Vietnamese Multitask Language Understanding (VMLU) benchmark, vi-mistral-x sets a new standard, outperforming other available models significantly. This paper highlights the critical role of continual pre-training in advancing language-specific LLMs and opens new avenues for the development of multilingual models. We aim for vi-mistral-x to not just be an important asset for processing the Vietnamese language but also to encourage more advancements in creating large language models for languages that are less represented.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in Machine Translation (MT). However, careful evaluations by human reveal that the translations produced by LLMs still contain multiple errors. Importantly, feeding back such error information into the LLMs can lead to self-refinement and result in improved translation performance. Motivated by these insights, we introduce a systematic LLM-based self-refinement translation framework, named TEaR, which stands for Translate, Estimate, and Refine, marking a significant step forward in this direction. Our findings demonstrate that 1) our self-refinement framework successfully assists LLMs in improving their translation quality across a wide range of languages, whether it's from high-resource languages to low-resource ones or whether it's English-centric or centered around other languages; 2) TEaR exhibits superior systematicity and interpretability; 3) different estimation strategies yield varied impacts, directly affecting the effectiveness of the final corrections. Additionally, traditional neural translation models and evaluation models operate separately, often focusing on singular tasks due to their limited capabilities, while general-purpose LLMs possess the capability to undertake both tasks simultaneously. We further conduct cross-model correction experiments to investigate the potential relationship between the translation and evaluation capabilities of general-purpose LLMs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/fzp0424/self_correct_mt

Large-scale multilingual machine translation systems have demonstrated remarkable ability to translate directly between numerous languages, making them increasingly appealing for real-world applications. However, when deployed in the wild, these models may generate hallucinated translations which have the potential to severely undermine user trust and raise safety concerns. Existing research on hallucinations has primarily focused on small bilingual models trained on high-resource languages, leaving a gap in our understanding of hallucinations in massively multilingual models across diverse translation scenarios. In this work, we fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis on both the M2M family of conventional neural machine translation models and ChatGPT, a general-purpose large language model~(LLM) that can be prompted for translation. Our investigation covers a broad spectrum of conditions, spanning over 100 translation directions across various resource levels and going beyond English-centric language pairs. We provide key insights regarding the prevalence, properties, and mitigation of hallucinations, paving the way towards more responsible and reliable machine translation systems.

With recent advancements in the area of Natural Language Processing, the focus is slowly shifting from a purely English-centric view towards more language-specific solutions, including German. Especially practical for businesses to analyze their growing amount of textual data are text summarization systems, which transform long input documents into compressed and more digestible summary texts. In this work, we assess the particular landscape of German abstractive text summarization and investigate the reasons why practically useful solutions for abstractive text summarization are still absent in industry. Our focus is two-fold, analyzing a) training resources, and b) publicly available summarization systems. We are able to show that popular existing datasets exhibit crucial flaws in their assumptions about the original sources, which frequently leads to detrimental effects on system generalization and evaluation biases. We confirm that for the most popular training dataset, MLSUM, over 50% of the training set is unsuitable for abstractive summarization purposes. Furthermore, available systems frequently fail to compare to simple baselines, and ignore more effective and efficient extractive summarization approaches. We attribute poor evaluation quality to a variety of different factors, which are investigated in more detail in this work: A lack of qualitative (and diverse) gold data considered for training, understudied (and untreated) positional biases in some of the existing datasets, and the lack of easily accessible and streamlined pre-processing strategies or analysis tools. We provide a comprehensive assessment of available models on the cleaned datasets, and find that this can lead to a reduction of more than 20 ROUGE-1 points during evaluation. The code for dataset filtering and reproducing results can be found online at https://github.com/dennlinger/summaries

Owing to the lack of corpora for low-resource languages, current works on dialogue generation have mainly focused on English. In this paper, we present mDIA, the first large-scale multilingual benchmark for dialogue generation across low- to high-resource languages. It covers real-life conversations in 46 languages across 19 language families. We present baseline results obtained by fine-tuning the multilingual, non-dialogue-focused pre-trained model mT5 as well as English-centric, dialogue-focused pre-trained chatbot DialoGPT. The results show that mT5-based models perform better on sacreBLEU and BertScore but worse on diversity. Even though promising results are found in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios, there is a large gap between the generation quality in English and other languages. We hope that the release of mDIA could encourage more works on multilingual dialogue generation to promote language diversity.

Scaling inference through long chains-of-thought (CoTs) has unlocked impressive reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), yet the reasoning process remains almost exclusively English-centric. We construct translated versions of two popular English reasoning datasets, fine-tune Qwen 2.5 (7B) and Qwen 3 (8B) models, and present a systematic study of long CoT generation across French, Japanese, Latvian, and Swahili. Our experiments reveal three key findings. First, the efficacy of using English as a pivot language varies by language: it provides no benefit for French, improves performance when used as the reasoning language for Japanese and Latvian, and proves insufficient for Swahili where both task comprehension and reasoning remain poor. Second, extensive multilingual pretraining in Qwen 3 narrows but does not eliminate the cross-lingual performance gap. A lightweight fine-tune using only 1k traces still improves performance by over 30\% in Swahili. Third, data quality versus scale trade-offs are language dependent: small, carefully curated datasets suffice for English and French, whereas larger but noisier corpora prove more effective for Swahili and Latvian. Together, these results clarify when and why long CoTs transfer across languages and provide translated datasets to foster equitable multilingual reasoning research.

While there has been a recent burgeoning of applications at the intersection of natural and programming languages, such as code generation and code summarization, these applications are usually English-centric. This creates a barrier for program developers who are not proficient in English. To mitigate this gap in technology development across languages, we propose a multilingual dataset, MCoNaLa, to benchmark code generation from natural language commands extending beyond English. Modeled off of the methodology from the English Code/Natural Language Challenge (CoNaLa) dataset, we annotated a total of 896 NL-code pairs in three languages: Spanish, Japanese, and Russian. We present a quantitative evaluation of performance on the MCoNaLa dataset by testing with state-of-the-art code generation systems. While the difficulties vary across these three languages, all systems lag significantly behind their English counterparts, revealing the challenges in adapting code generation to new languages.

Large language models (LLMs) are advancing at an unprecedented pace globally, with regions increasingly adopting these models for applications in their primary language. Evaluation of these models in diverse linguistic environments, especially in low-resource languages, has become a major challenge for academia and industry. Existing evaluation frameworks are disproportionately focused on English and a handful of high-resource languages, thereby overlooking the realistic performance of LLMs in multilingual and lower-resource scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce GlotEval, a lightweight framework designed for massively multilingual evaluation. Supporting seven key tasks (machine translation, text classification, summarization, open-ended generation, reading comprehension, sequence labeling, and intrinsic evaluation), spanning over dozens to hundreds of languages, GlotEval highlights consistent multilingual benchmarking, language-specific prompt templates, and non-English-centric machine translation. This enables a precise diagnosis of model strengths and weaknesses in diverse linguistic contexts. A multilingual translation case study demonstrates GlotEval's applicability for multilingual and language-specific evaluations.

Foundation model development attracts a rapidly expanding body of contributors, scientists, and applications. To help shape responsible development practices, we introduce the Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: a growing collection of 250+ tools and resources spanning text, vision, and speech modalities. We draw on a large body of prior work to survey resources (e.g. software, documentation, frameworks, guides, and practical tools) that support informed data selection, processing, and understanding, precise and limitation-aware artifact documentation, efficient model training, advance awareness of the environmental impact from training, careful model evaluation of capabilities, risks, and claims, as well as responsible model release, licensing and deployment practices. We hope this curated collection of resources helps guide more responsible development. The process of curating this list, enabled us to review the AI development ecosystem, revealing what tools are critically missing, misused, or over-used in existing practices. We find that (i) tools for data sourcing, model evaluation, and monitoring are critically under-serving ethical and real-world needs, (ii) evaluations for model safety, capabilities, and environmental impact all lack reproducibility and transparency, (iii) text and particularly English-centric analyses continue to dominate over multilingual and multi-modal analyses, and (iv) evaluation of systems, rather than just models, is needed so that capabilities and impact are assessed in context.

Text-to-Image generation (TTI) technologies are advancing rapidly, especially in the English language communities. However, English-native TTI models inherently carry biases from English world centric training data, which creates a dilemma for development of other language-native TTI models. One common choice is fine-tuning the English-native TTI model with translated samples from non-English communities. It falls short of fully addressing the model bias problem. Alternatively, training non-English language native models from scratch can effectively resolve the English world bias, but diverges from the English TTI communities, thus not able to utilize the strides continuously gaining in the English TTI communities any more. To build non-English language native TTI model meanwhile keep compatability with the English TTI communities, we propose a novel model structure referred as "Bridge Diffusion Model" (BDM). The proposed BDM employs a backbone-branch network structure to learn the non-English language semantics while keep the latent space compatible with the English-native TTI backbone, in an end-to-end manner. The unique advantages of the proposed BDM are that it's not only adept at generating images that precisely depict non-English language semantics, but also compatible with various English-native TTI plugins, such as different checkpoints, LoRA, ControlNet, Dreambooth, and Textual Inversion, etc. Moreover, BDM can concurrently generate content seamlessly combining both non-English native and English-native semantics within a single image, fostering cultural interaction. We verify our method by applying BDM to build a Chinese-native TTI model, whereas the method is generic and applicable to any other language.

In this paper, we evaluate different abilities of GPT-4V including visual understanding, language understanding, visual puzzle solving, and understanding of other modalities such as depth, thermal, video, and audio. To estimate GPT-4V's performance, we manually construct 656 test instances and carefully evaluate the results of GPT-4V. The highlights of our findings are as follows: (1) GPT-4V exhibits impressive performance on English visual-centric benchmarks but fails to recognize simple Chinese texts in the images; (2) GPT-4V shows inconsistent refusal behavior when answering questions related to sensitive traits such as gender, race, and age; (3) GPT-4V obtains worse results than GPT-4 (API) on language understanding tasks including general language understanding benchmarks and visual commonsense knowledge evaluation benchmarks; (4) Few-shot prompting can improve GPT-4V's performance on both visual understanding and language understanding; (5) GPT-4V struggles to find the nuances between two similar images and solve the easy math picture puzzles; (6) GPT-4V shows non-trivial performance on the tasks of similar modalities to image, such as video and thermal. Our experimental results reveal the ability and limitations of GPT-4V and we hope our paper can provide some insights into the application and research of GPT-4V.

Despite recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their development has predominantly focused on English- and western-centric datasets and tasks, leaving most of the world's languages and diverse cultural contexts underrepresented. This paper introduces Pangea, a multilingual multimodal LLM trained on PangeaIns, a diverse 6M instruction dataset spanning 39 languages. PangeaIns features: 1) high-quality English instructions, 2) carefully machine-translated instructions, and 3) culturally relevant multimodal tasks to ensure cross-cultural coverage. To rigorously assess models' capabilities, we introduce PangeaBench, a holistic evaluation suite encompassing 14 datasets covering 47 languages. Results show that Pangea significantly outperforms existing open-source models in multilingual settings and diverse cultural contexts. Ablation studies further reveal the importance of English data proportions, language popularity, and the number of multimodal training samples on overall performance. We fully open-source our data, code, and trained checkpoints, to facilitate the development of inclusive and robust multilingual MLLMs, promoting equity and accessibility across a broader linguistic and cultural spectrum.

Accurate alignment between languages is fundamental for improving cross-lingual pre-trained language models (XLMs). Motivated by the natural phenomenon of code-switching (CS) in multilingual speakers, CS has been used as an effective data augmentation method that offers language alignment at the word- or phrase-level, in contrast to sentence-level via parallel instances. Existing approaches either use dictionaries or parallel sentences with word alignment to generate CS data by randomly switching words in a sentence. However, such methods can be suboptimal as dictionaries disregard semantics, and syntax might become invalid after random word switching. In this work, we propose EntityCS, a method that focuses on Entity-level Code-Switching to capture fine-grained cross-lingual semantics without corrupting syntax. We use Wikidata and English Wikipedia to construct an entity-centric CS corpus by switching entities to their counterparts in other languages. We further propose entity-oriented masking strategies during intermediate model training on the EntityCS corpus for improving entity prediction. Evaluation of the trained models on four entity-centric downstream tasks shows consistent improvements over the baseline with a notable increase of 10% in Fact Retrieval. We release the corpus and models to assist research on code-switching and enriching XLMs with external knowledge.

In this study, we introduce CT-LLM, a 2B large language model (LLM) that illustrates a pivotal shift towards prioritizing the Chinese language in developing LLMs. Uniquely initiated from scratch, CT-LLM diverges from the conventional methodology by primarily incorporating Chinese textual data, utilizing an extensive corpus of 1,200 billion tokens, including 800 billion Chinese tokens, 300 billion English tokens, and 100 billion code tokens. This strategic composition facilitates the model's exceptional proficiency in understanding and processing Chinese, a capability further enhanced through alignment techniques. Demonstrating remarkable performance on the CHC-Bench, CT-LLM excels in Chinese language tasks, and showcases its adeptness in English through SFT. This research challenges the prevailing paradigm of training LLMs predominantly on English corpora and then adapting them to other languages, broadening the horizons for LLM training methodologies. By open-sourcing the full process of training a Chinese LLM, including a detailed data processing procedure with the obtained Massive Appropriate Pretraining Chinese Corpus (MAP-CC), a well-chosen multidisciplinary Chinese Hard Case Benchmark (CHC-Bench), and the 2B-size Chinese Tiny LLM (CT-LLM), we aim to foster further exploration and innovation in both academia and industry, paving the way for more inclusive and versatile language models.

Large language models (LLMs) trained primarily on English corpora often struggle to capture the linguistic and cultural nuances of Arabic. To address this gap, the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) introduced the ALLaM family of Arabic-focused models. The most capable of these available to the public, ALLaM-34B, was subsequently adopted by HUMAIN, who developed and deployed HUMAIN Chat, a closed conversational web service built on this model. This paper presents an expanded and refined UI-level evaluation of ALLaM-34B. Using a prompt pack spanning modern standard Arabic, five regional dialects, code-switching, factual knowledge, arithmetic and temporal reasoning, creative generation, and adversarial safety, we collected 115 outputs (23 prompts times 5 runs) and scored each with three frontier LLM judges (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet-4). We compute category-level means with 95\% confidence intervals, analyze score distributions, and visualize dialect-wise metric heat maps. The updated analysis reveals consistently high performance on generation and code-switching tasks (both averaging 4.92/5), alongside strong results in MSA handling (4.74/5), solid reasoning ability (4.64/5), and improved dialect fidelity (4.21/5). Safety-related prompts show stable, reliable performance of (4.54/5). Taken together, these results position ALLaM-34B as a robust and culturally grounded Arabic LLM, demonstrating both technical strength and practical readiness for real-world deployment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of NLP benchmarks, often surpassing human-level accuracy. However, their reliability in high-stakes domains such as medicine, particularly in low-resource languages, remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce PersianMedQA, a large-scale, expert-validated dataset of multiple-choice Persian medical questions, designed to evaluate LLMs across both Persian and English. We benchmark over 40 state-of-the-art models, including general-purpose, Persian fine-tuned, and medical LLMs, in zero-shot and chain-of-thought (CoT) settings. Our results show that closed-source general models (e.g., GPT-4.1) consistently outperform all other categories, achieving 83.3% accuracy in Persian and 80.7% in English, while Persian fine-tuned models such as Dorna underperform significantly (e.g., 35.9% in Persian), often struggling with both instruction-following and domain reasoning. We also analyze the impact of translation, showing that while English performance is generally higher, Persian responses are sometimes more accurate due to cultural and clinical contextual cues. Finally, we demonstrate that model size alone is insufficient for robust performance without strong domain or language adaptation. PersianMedQA provides a foundation for evaluating multilingual and culturally grounded medical reasoning in LLMs. The PersianMedQA dataset can be accessed at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/MohammadJRanjbar/PersianMedQA](https://huggingface.co/datasets/MohammadJRanjbar/PersianMedQA

We present Hala, a family of Arabic-centric instruction and translation models built with our translate-and-tune pipeline. We first compress a strong ARleftrightarrowEN teacher to FP8 (yielding sim2times higher throughput with no quality loss) and use it to create high-fidelity bilingual supervision. A lightweight language model LFM2-1.2B is then fine-tuned on this data and used to translate high-quality English instruction sets into Arabic, producing a million-scale corpus tailored to instruction following. We train Hala models at 350M, 700M, 1.2B, and 9B parameters, and apply slerp merging to balance Arabic specialization with base-model strengths. On Arabic-centric benchmarks, Hala achieves state-of-the-art results within both the "nano" (leq2B) and "small" (7-9B) categories, outperforming their bases. We release models, data, evaluation, and recipes to accelerate research in Arabic NLP.

Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) in its proper format not only facilitates human-machine interaction in text-centric visual environments but also serves as a de facto gold proxy to evaluate AI models in the domain of text-centric scene understanding. However, most TEC-VQA benchmarks have focused on high-resource languages like English and Chinese. Despite pioneering works to expand multilingual QA pairs in non-text-centric VQA datasets using translation engines, the translation-based protocol encounters a substantial ``Visual-textual misalignment'' problem when applied to TEC-VQA. Specifically, it prioritizes the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding the visual text present in images. Furthermore, it does not adequately tackle challenges related to nuanced meaning, contextual distortion, language bias, and question-type diversity. In this work, we address the task of multilingual TEC-VQA and provide a benchmark with high-quality human expert annotations in 9 diverse languages, called MTVQA. To our knowledge, MTVQA is the first multilingual TEC-VQA benchmark to provide human expert annotations for text-centric scenarios. Further, by evaluating several state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), including GPT-4V, on our MTVQA dataset, it is evident that there is still room for performance improvement, underscoring the value of our dataset. We hope this dataset will provide researchers with fresh perspectives and inspiration within the community. The MTVQA dataset will be available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ByteDance/MTVQA.

We present Fanar, a platform for Arabic-centric multimodal generative AI systems, that supports language, speech and image generation tasks. At the heart of Fanar are Fanar Star and Fanar Prime, two highly capable Arabic Large Language Models (LLMs) that are best in the class on well established benchmarks for similar sized models. Fanar Star is a 7B (billion) parameter model that was trained from scratch on nearly 1 trillion clean and deduplicated Arabic, English and Code tokens. Fanar Prime is a 9B parameter model continually trained on the Gemma-2 9B base model on the same 1 trillion token set. Both models are concurrently deployed and designed to address different types of prompts transparently routed through a custom-built orchestrator. The Fanar platform provides many other capabilities including a customized Islamic Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system for handling religious prompts, a Recency RAG for summarizing information about current or recent events that have occurred after the pre-training data cut-off date. The platform provides additional cognitive capabilities including in-house bilingual speech recognition that supports multiple Arabic dialects, voice and image generation that is fine-tuned to better reflect regional characteristics. Finally, Fanar provides an attribution service that can be used to verify the authenticity of fact based generated content. The design, development, and implementation of Fanar was entirely undertaken at Hamad Bin Khalifa University's Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and was sponsored by Qatar's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to enable sovereign AI technology development.

Evaluating the general abilities of foundation models to tackle human-level tasks is a vital aspect of their development and application in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Traditional benchmarks, which rely on artificial datasets, may not accurately represent human-level capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AGIEval, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess foundation model in the context of human-centric standardized exams, such as college entrance exams, law school admission tests, math competitions, and lawyer qualification tests. We evaluate several state-of-the-art foundation models, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Text-Davinci-003, using this benchmark. Impressively, GPT-4 surpasses average human performance on SAT, LSAT, and math competitions, attaining a 95% accuracy rate on the SAT Math test and a 92.5% accuracy on the English test of the Chinese national college entrance exam. This demonstrates the extraordinary performance of contemporary foundation models. In contrast, we also find that GPT-4 is less proficient in tasks that require complex reasoning or specific domain knowledge. Our comprehensive analyses of model capabilities (understanding, knowledge, reasoning, and calculation) reveal these models' strengths and limitations, providing valuable insights into future directions for enhancing their general capabilities. By concentrating on tasks pertinent to human cognition and decision-making, our benchmark delivers a more meaningful and robust evaluation of foundation models' performance in real-world scenarios. The data, code, and all model outputs are released in https://github.com/microsoft/AGIEval.

Steel-LLM is a Chinese-centric language model developed from scratch with the goal of creating a high-quality, open-source model despite limited computational resources. Launched in March 2024, the project aimed to train a 1-billion-parameter model on a large-scale dataset, prioritizing transparency and the sharing of practical insights to assist others in the community. The training process primarily focused on Chinese data, with a small proportion of English data included, addressing gaps in existing open-source LLMs by providing a more detailed and practical account of the model-building journey. Steel-LLM has demonstrated competitive performance on benchmarks such as CEVAL and CMMLU, outperforming early models from larger institutions. This paper provides a comprehensive summary of the project's key contributions, including data collection, model design, training methodologies, and the challenges encountered along the way, offering a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners looking to develop their own LLMs. The model checkpoints and training script are available at https://github.com/zhanshijinwat/Steel-LLM.

To ensure safe usage, Large Language Models (LLMs) typically undergo alignment with human-defined values. However, this alignment often relies on primarily English data and is biased towards Western-centric values, limiting its effectiveness in low-resource language settings. In this paper, we describe our approach for aligning SEA-Lion-v2.1-Instruct (a Llama3-8B variant) to minimize toxicity in Singlish, an English creole specific to Singapore. We find that supervised fine-tuning and Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) on paired and unpaired preferences is more sample efficient and yields significantly better results than Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Our analysis reveals that DPO implicitly enforces a weaker safety objective than KTO, and that SFT complements KTO by improving training stability. Finally, we introduce a simple but novel modification to KTO, KTO-S, which improves training stability through better gradient exploitation. Overall, we present a general approach for safety alignment conducive to low-resource English languages, successfully reducing toxicity by 99\% on our Singlish benchmark, with gains generalizing to the broader TOXIGEN dataset while maintaining strong performance across standard LLM benchmarks.

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) in vertical domains, including intellectual property (IP), lacks a specific evaluation benchmark for assessing their understanding, application, and reasoning abilities. To fill this gap, we introduce IPEval, the first evaluation benchmark tailored for IP agency and consulting tasks. IPEval comprises 2657 multiple-choice questions across four major dimensions: creation, application, protection, and management of IP. These questions span patent rights (inventions, utility models, designs), trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, and other related laws. Evaluation methods include zero-shot, 5-few-shot, and Chain of Thought (CoT) for seven LLM types, predominantly in English or Chinese. Results show superior English performance by models like GPT series and Qwen series, while Chinese-centric LLMs excel in Chinese tests, albeit specialized IP LLMs lag behind general-purpose ones. Regional and temporal aspects of IP underscore the need for LLMs to grasp legal nuances and evolving laws. IPEval aims to accurately gauge LLM capabilities in IP and spur development of specialized models. Website: https://ipeval.github.io/

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning when they include intermediate steps, known as "chains of thought" (CoTs). However, these rationales are often overly verbose, even for simple problems, leading to wasted context, increased latency, and higher energy consumption. We observe that verbose, English-heavy CoTs and concise, math-centric CoTs occupy distinct regions in the model's residual-stream activation space. By extracting and injecting a "steering vector" to transition between these modes, we can reliably shift generation toward more concise reasoning, effectively compressing CoTs without retraining. We formalize this approach as Activation-Steered Compression (ASC), an inference-time technique that shortens reasoning traces by directly modifying hidden representations. In addition, we provide a theoretical analysis of the impact of ASC on the output distribution, derived from a closed-form KL-divergence-bounded constraint to regulate steering strength. Using only 100 paired verbose and concise examples, ASC achieves up to 67.43% reduction in CoT length on MATH500 and GSM8K datasets, while maintaining accuracy across 7B, 8B, and 32B parameter models. As a training-free method, ASC introduces negligible runtime overhead and, on MATH500, delivers an average 2.73x speedup in end-to-end reasoning wall-clock time on an 8B model. This makes ASC a practical and efficient tool for streamlining the deployment of reasoning-capable LLMs in latency- or cost-sensitive settings. The code is available at: https://github.com/ArminAzizi98/ASC

The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare has been dominated by physician-centric, English-language benchmarks, creating a dangerous illusion of competence that ignores the interprofessional nature of patient care. To provide a more holistic and realistic assessment, we introduce HealthQA-BR, the first large-scale, system-wide benchmark for Portuguese-speaking healthcare. Comprising 5,632 questions from Brazil's national licensing and residency exams, it uniquely assesses knowledge not only in medicine and its specialties but also in nursing, dentistry, psychology, social work, and other allied health professions. We conducted a rigorous zero-shot evaluation of over 20 leading LLMs. Our results reveal that while state-of-the-art models like GPT 4.1 achieve high overall accuracy (86.6%), this top-line score masks alarming, previously unmeasured deficiencies. A granular analysis shows performance plummets from near-perfect in specialties like Ophthalmology (98.7%) to barely passing in Neurosurgery (60.0%) and, most notably, Social Work (68.4%). This "spiky" knowledge profile is a systemic issue observed across all models, demonstrating that high-level scores are insufficient for safety validation. By publicly releasing HealthQA-BR and our evaluation suite, we provide a crucial tool to move beyond single-score evaluations and toward a more honest, granular audit of AI readiness for the entire healthcare team.

Recent advancements in instruction fine-tuning, alignment methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and optimization techniques like direct preference optimization (DPO) have significantly enhanced the adaptability of large language models (LLMs) to user preferences. However, despite these innovations, many LLMs continue to exhibit biases toward Western, Anglo-centric, or American cultures, with performance on English data consistently surpassing that of other languages. This reveals a persistent cultural gap in LLMs, which complicates their ability to accurately process culturally rich and diverse figurative language such as proverbs. To address this, we introduce Jawaher, a benchmark designed to assess LLMs' capacity to comprehend and interpret Arabic proverbs. Jawaher includes proverbs from various Arabic dialects, along with idiomatic translations and explanations. Through extensive evaluations of both open- and closed-source models, we find that while LLMs can generate idiomatically accurate translations, they struggle with producing culturally nuanced and contextually relevant explanations. These findings highlight the need for ongoing model refinement and dataset expansion to bridge the cultural gap in figurative language processing.

Recent advances in zero-shot and few-shot learning have shown promise for a scope of research and practical purposes. However, this fast-growing area lacks standardized evaluation suites for non-English languages, hindering progress outside the Anglo-centric paradigm. To address this line of research, we propose TAPE (Text Attack and Perturbation Evaluation), a novel benchmark that includes six more complex NLU tasks for Russian, covering multi-hop reasoning, ethical concepts, logic and commonsense knowledge. The TAPE's design focuses on systematic zero-shot and few-shot NLU evaluation: (i) linguistic-oriented adversarial attacks and perturbations for analyzing robustness, and (ii) subpopulations for nuanced interpretation. The detailed analysis of testing the autoregressive baselines indicates that simple spelling-based perturbations affect the performance the most, while paraphrasing the input has a more negligible effect. At the same time, the results demonstrate a significant gap between the neural and human baselines for most tasks. We publicly release TAPE (tape-benchmark.com) to foster research on robust LMs that can generalize to new tasks when little to no supervision is available.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, and it is often used to test the ability of vision-language models to understand and reason on knowledge present in both visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA models use datasets that are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images that are typically Western-centric. While recent efforts have tried to increase the number of languages covered on VQA datasets, they still lack diversity in low-resource languages. More importantly, although these datasets often extend their linguistic range via translation or some other approaches, they usually keep images the same, resulting in narrow cultural representation. To address these limitations, we construct CVQA, a new Culturally-diverse multilingual Visual Question Answering benchmark, designed to cover a rich set of languages and cultures, where we engage native speakers and cultural experts in the data collection process. As a result, CVQA includes culturally-driven images and questions from across 28 countries on four continents, covering 26 languages with 11 scripts, providing a total of 9k questions. We then benchmark several Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on CVQA, and show that the dataset is challenging for the current state-of-the-art models. This benchmark can serve as a probing evaluation suite for assessing the cultural capability and bias of multimodal models and hopefully encourage more research efforts toward increasing cultural awareness and linguistic diversity in this field.

Slot-filling and intent detection are well-established tasks in Conversational AI. However, current large-scale benchmarks for these tasks often exclude evaluations of low-resource languages and rely on translations from English benchmarks, thereby predominantly reflecting Western-centric concepts. In this paper, we introduce Injongo -- a multicultural, open-source benchmark dataset for 16 African languages with utterances generated by native speakers across diverse domains, including banking, travel, home, and dining. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark the fine-tuning multilingual transformer models and the prompting large language models (LLMs), and show the advantage of leveraging African-cultural utterances over Western-centric utterances for improving cross-lingual transfer from the English language. Experimental results reveal that current LLMs struggle with the slot-filling task, with GPT-4o achieving an average performance of 26 F1-score. In contrast, intent detection performance is notably better, with an average accuracy of 70.6%, though it still falls behind the fine-tuning baselines. Compared to the English language, GPT-4o and fine-tuning baselines perform similarly on intent detection, achieving an accuracy of approximately 81%. Our findings suggest that the performance of LLMs is still behind for many low-resource African languages, and more work is needed to further improve their downstream performance.