Daily Papers

Cross-lingual open information extraction aims to extract structured information from raw text across multiple languages. Previous work uses a shared cross-lingual pre-trained model to handle the different languages but underuses the potential of the language-specific representation. In this paper, we propose an effective multi-stage tuning framework called MT4CrossIE, designed for enhancing cross-lingual open information extraction by injecting language-specific knowledge into the shared model. Specifically, the cross-lingual pre-trained model is first tuned in a shared semantic space (e.g., embedding matrix) in the fixed encoder and then other components are optimized in the second stage. After enough training, we freeze the pre-trained model and tune the multiple extra low-rank language-specific modules using mixture-of-LoRAs for model-based cross-lingual transfer. In addition, we leverage two-stage prompting to encourage the large language model (LLM) to annotate the multi-lingual raw data for data-based cross-lingual transfer. The model is trained with multi-lingual objectives on our proposed dataset OpenIE4++ by combing the model-based and data-based transfer techniques. Experimental results on various benchmarks emphasize the importance of aggregating multiple plug-in-and-play language-specific modules and demonstrate the effectiveness of MT4CrossIE in cross-lingual OIE\url{https://github.com/CSJianYang/Multilingual-Multimodal-NLP}.

Large language models often struggle with zero-shot generalization, and several modular approaches have been proposed to address this challenge. Yet, we hypothesize that a key limitation remains: the entanglement of general knowledge and task-specific adaptations. To overcome this, we propose a modular framework that disentangles these components by constructing a library of task-specific LoRA modules alongside a general-domain LoRA. By subtracting this general knowledge component from each task-specific module, we obtain residual modules that focus more exclusively on task-relevant information, a method we call general knowledge subtraction (GenKnowSub). Leveraging the refined task-specific modules and the Arrow routing algorithm ostapenko2024towards, we dynamically select and combine modules for new inputs without additional training. Our studies on the Phi-3 model and standard Arrow as baselines reveal that using general knowledge LoRAs derived from diverse languages, including English, French, and German, yields consistent performance gains in both monolingual and cross-lingual settings across a wide set of benchmarks. Further experiments on Phi-2 demonstrate how GenKnowSub generalizes to weaker LLMs. The complete code and data are available at https://github.com/saharsamr/Modular-LLM.

While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities at task-specific applications through fine-tuning, extending these benefits across diverse languages is essential for broad accessibility. However, effective cross-lingual transfer is hindered by LLM performance gaps across languages and the scarcity of fine-tuning data in many languages. Through analysis of LLM internal representations from over 1,000+ language pairs, we discover that middle layers exhibit the strongest potential for cross-lingual alignment. Building on this finding, we propose a middle-layer alignment objective integrated into task-specific training. Our experiments on slot filling, machine translation, and structured text generation show consistent improvements in cross-lingual transfer, especially to lower-resource languages. The method is robust to the choice of alignment languages and generalizes to languages unseen during alignment. Furthermore, we show that separately trained alignment modules can be merged with existing task-specific modules, improving cross-lingual capabilities without full re-training. Our code is publicly available (https://github.com/dannigt/mid-align).

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks. However, training LLMs from scratch requires significant computational power and extensive memory capacity. Recent studies have explored low-rank structures on weights for efficient fine-tuning in terms of parameters and memory, either through low-rank adaptation or factorization. While effective for fine-tuning, low-rank structures are generally less suitable for pretraining because they restrict parameters to a low-dimensional subspace. In this work, we propose to parameterize the weights as a sum of low-rank and sparse matrices for pretraining, which we call SLTrain. The low-rank component is learned via matrix factorization, while for the sparse component, we employ a simple strategy of uniformly selecting the sparsity support at random and learning only the non-zero entries with the fixed support. While being simple, the random fixed-support sparse learning strategy significantly enhances pretraining when combined with low-rank learning. Our results show that SLTrain adds minimal extra parameters and memory costs compared to pretraining with low-rank parameterization, yet achieves substantially better performance, which is comparable to full-rank training. Remarkably, when combined with quantization and per-layer updates, SLTrain can reduce memory requirements by up to 73% when pretraining the LLaMA 7B model.

As an efficient alternative to conventional full finetuning, parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) is becoming the prevailing method to adapt pretrained language models. In PEFT, a lightweight module is learned on each dataset while the underlying pretrained language model remains unchanged, resulting in multiple compact modules representing diverse skills when applied to various domains and tasks. In this paper, we propose to compose these parameter-efficient modules through linear arithmetic operations in the weight space, thereby integrating different module capabilities. Specifically, we first define addition and negation operators for the module, and then further compose these two basic operators to perform flexible arithmetic. Our approach requires no additional training and enables highly flexible module composition. We apply different arithmetic operations to compose the parameter-efficient modules for (1) distribution generalization, (2) multi-tasking, (3) unlearning, and (4) domain transfer. Additionally, we extend our approach to detoxify Alpaca-LoRA, the latest instruction-tuned large language model based on LLaMA. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach produces new and effective parameter-efficient modules that significantly outperform existing ones across all settings.

State-of-the-art neural retrievers predominantly focus on high-resource languages like English, which impedes their adoption in retrieval scenarios involving other languages. Current approaches circumvent the lack of high-quality labeled data in non-English languages by leveraging multilingual pretrained language models capable of cross-lingual transfer. However, these models require substantial task-specific fine-tuning across multiple languages, often perform poorly in languages with minimal representation in the pretraining corpus, and struggle to incorporate new languages after the pretraining phase. In this work, we present a novel modular dense retrieval model that learns from the rich data of a single high-resource language and effectively zero-shot transfers to a wide array of languages, thereby eliminating the need for language-specific labeled data. Our model, ColBERT-XM, demonstrates competitive performance against existing state-of-the-art multilingual retrievers trained on more extensive datasets in various languages. Further analysis reveals that our modular approach is highly data-efficient, effectively adapts to out-of-distribution data, and significantly reduces energy consumption and carbon emissions. By demonstrating its proficiency in zero-shot scenarios, ColBERT-XM marks a shift towards more sustainable and inclusive retrieval systems, enabling effective information accessibility in numerous languages. We publicly release our code and models for the community.

We expose the limitation of modular multilingual language models (MLMs) in multilingual inference scenarios with unknown languages. Existing evaluations of modular MLMs exclude the involvement of language identification (LID) modules, which obscures the performance of real-case multilingual scenarios of modular MLMs. In this work, we showcase the effect of adding LID on the multilingual evaluation of modular MLMs and provide discussions for closing the performance gap of caused by the pipelined approach of LID and modular MLMs.

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies on extensive text corpora, which are often unevenly distributed across languages. This imbalance results in LLMs performing significantly better on high-resource languages like English, German, and French, while their capabilities in low-resource languages remain inadequate. Currently, there is a lack of quantitative methods to evaluate the performance of LLMs in these low-resource languages. To address this gap, we propose the Language Ranker, an intrinsic metric designed to benchmark and rank languages based on LLM performance using internal representations. By comparing the LLM's internal representation of various languages against a baseline derived from English, we can assess the model's multilingual capabilities in a robust and language-agnostic manner. Our analysis reveals that high-resource languages exhibit higher similarity scores with English, demonstrating superior performance, while low-resource languages show lower similarity scores, underscoring the effectiveness of our metric in assessing language-specific capabilities. Besides, the experiments show that there is a strong correlation between the LLM's performance in different languages and the proportion of those languages in its pre-training corpus. These insights underscore the efficacy of the Language Ranker as a tool for evaluating LLM performance across different languages, particularly those with limited resources.

Low-rank adaptation is a popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for large language models. In this paper, we analyze the impact of low-rank updating, as implemented in LoRA. Our findings suggest that the low-rank updating mechanism may limit the ability of LLMs to effectively learn and memorize new knowledge. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new method called MoRA, which employs a square matrix to achieve high-rank updating while maintaining the same number of trainable parameters. To achieve it, we introduce the corresponding non-parameter operators to reduce the input dimension and increase the output dimension for the square matrix. Furthermore, these operators ensure that the weight can be merged back into LLMs, which makes our method can be deployed like LoRA. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of our method across five tasks: instruction tuning, mathematical reasoning, continual pretraining, memory and pretraining. Our method outperforms LoRA on memory-intensive tasks and achieves comparable performance on other tasks.

We propose a memory-efficient finetuning algorithm for large language models (LLMs) that supports finetuning LLMs with 65B parameters in 3-bit or 4-bit precision on as little as one 48GB GPU. Our method, modular low-rank adaptation (ModuLoRA), integrates any user-specified weight quantizer with finetuning via low-rank adapters (LoRAs). Our approach relies on a simple quantization-agnostic backward pass that adaptively materializes low-precision LLM weights from a custom black-box quantization module. This approach enables finetuning 3-bit LLMs for the first time--leveraging state-of-the-art 3-bit OPTQ quantization often outperforms finetuning that relies on less sophisticated 4-bit and 8-bit methods. In our experiments, ModuLoRA attains competitive performance on text classification, natural language infernece, and instruction following tasks using significantly less memory than existing approaches, and we also surpass the state-of-the-art ROUGE score on a popular summarization task. We release ModuLoRA together with a series of low-precision models--including the first family of 3-bit instruction following Alpaca LLMs--as part of LLMTOOLS, a user-friendly library for quantizing, running, and finetuning LLMs on consumer GPUs.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a popular technique for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to various domains due to its modular design and widespread availability on platforms like Huggingface. This modularity has sparked interest in combining multiple LoRAs to enhance LLM capabilities. However, existing methods for LoRA composition primarily focus on task-specific adaptations that require additional training, and current model merging techniques often fail to fully leverage LoRA's modular nature, leading to parameter interference and performance degradation. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of disassembling and reassembling multiple LoRAs at a finer granularity, analogous to assembling LEGO blocks. We introduce the concept of Minimal Semantic Units (MSUs), where the parameters corresponding to each rank in LoRA function as independent units. These MSUs demonstrate permutation invariance and concatenation-summation equivalence properties, enabling flexible combinations to create new LoRAs. Building on these insights, we propose the LoRA-LEGO framework. This framework conducts rank-wise parameter clustering by grouping MSUs from different LoRAs into k clusters. The centroid of each cluster serves as a representative MSU, enabling the assembly of a merged LoRA with an adjusted rank of k. Additionally, we apply a dual reweighting strategy to optimize the scale of the merged LoRA. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in LoRA merging.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained popularity due to their impressive few-shot performance across various downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning all parameters and storing a unique model for each downstream task or domain becomes impractical because of the massive size of checkpoints (e.g., 350GB in GPT-3). Current literature, such as LoRA, showcases the potential of low-rank modifications to the original weights of an LLM, enabling efficient adaptation and storage for task-specific models. These methods can reduce the number of parameters needed to fine-tune an LLM by several orders of magnitude. Yet, these methods face two primary limitations: 1) the parameter reduction is lower-bounded by the rank one decomposition, and 2) the extent of reduction is heavily influenced by both the model architecture and the chosen rank. For instance, in larger models, even a rank one decomposition might exceed the number of parameters truly needed for adaptation. In this paper, we introduce NOLA, which overcomes the rank one lower bound present in LoRA. It achieves this by re-parameterizing the low-rank matrices in LoRA using linear combinations of randomly generated matrices (basis) and optimizing the linear mixture coefficients only. This approach allows us to decouple the number of trainable parameters from both the choice of rank and the network architecture. We present adaptation results using GPT-2 and ViT in natural language and computer vision tasks. NOLA performs as well as, or better than models with equivalent parameter counts. Furthermore, we demonstrate that we can halve the parameters in larger models compared to LoRA with rank one, without sacrificing performance.

Low-rank adaptations (LoRA) are often employed to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) for new tasks. This paper investigates LoRA composability for cross-task generalization and introduces LoraHub, a strategic framework devised for the purposive assembly of LoRA modules trained on diverse given tasks, with the objective of achieving adaptable performance on unseen tasks. With just a few examples from a novel task, LoraHub enables the fluid combination of multiple LoRA modules, eradicating the need for human expertise. Notably, the composition requires neither additional model parameters nor gradients. Our empirical results, derived from the Big-Bench Hard (BBH) benchmark, suggest that LoraHub can effectively mimic the performance of in-context learning in few-shot scenarios, excluding the necessity of in-context examples alongside each inference input. A significant contribution of our research is the fostering of a community for LoRA, where users can share their trained LoRA modules, thereby facilitating their application to new tasks. We anticipate this resource will widen access to and spur advancements in general intelligence as well as LLMs in production. Code will be available at https://github.com/sail-sg/lorahub.

Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) often avoid using language embeddings -- learnable vectors assigned to different languages. These embeddings are discarded for two main reasons: (1) mPLMs are expected to have a single, unified parameter set across all languages, and (2) they need to function seamlessly as universal text encoders without requiring language IDs as input. However, this removal increases the burden on token embeddings to encode all language-specific information, which may hinder the model's ability to produce more language-neutral representations. To address this challenge, we propose Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining (LangSAMP), a method that incorporates both language and script embeddings to enhance representation learning while maintaining a simple architecture. Specifically, we integrate these embeddings into the output of the transformer blocks before passing the final representations to the language modeling head for prediction. We apply LangSAMP to the continual pretraining of XLM-R on a highly multilingual corpus covering more than 500 languages. The resulting model consistently outperforms the baseline. Extensive analysis further shows that language/script embeddings encode language/script-specific information, which improves the selection of source languages for crosslingual transfer. We make our code and models publicly available at https://github.com/cisnlp/LangSAMP.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results. But existing models are expensive to train and deploy, and it is also difficult to expand their knowledge beyond pre-training data without forgetting previous knowledge. This paper proposes a new neural network architecture, ModuleFormer, that leverages modularity to improve the efficiency and flexibility of large language models. ModuleFormer is based on the Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE). Unlike the previous SMoE-based modular language model [Gururangan et al., 2021], which requires domain-labeled data to learn domain-specific experts, ModuleFormer can induce modularity from uncurated data with its new load balancing and load concentration losses. ModuleFormer is a modular architecture that includes two different types of modules, new stick-breaking attention heads, and feedforward experts. Different modules are sparsely activated conditions on the input token during training and inference. In our experiment, we found that the modular architecture enables three important abilities for large pre-trained language models: 1) Efficiency, since ModuleFormer only activates a subset of its modules for each input token, thus it could achieve the same performance as dense LLMs with more than two times throughput; 2) Extendability, ModuleFormer is more immune to catastrophic forgetting than dense LLMs and can be easily extended with new modules to learn new knowledge that is not included in the training data; 3) Specialisation, finetuning ModuleFormer could specialize a subset of modules to the finetuning task, and the task-unrelated modules could be easily pruned for a lightweight deployment.

In this work, we undertake the challenge of augmenting the existing generative capabilities of pre-trained text-only large language models (LLMs) with multi-modal generation capability while satisfying two core constraints: C1 preserving the preservation of original language generative capabilities with negligible performance degradation, and C2 adhering to a small parameter budget to learn the new modality, ensuring scalability and efficiency. In contrast to current approaches that add dedicated modules, thereby significantly increasing the parameter count, we propose a method that leverages the underutilized capacity inherent in deep models. Specifically, we exploit the parameter redundancy within Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) as a source of additional capacity for learning a new modality, enabling better parameter efficiency (C1). Moreover, we preserve the original language generation capabilities by applying low-rank adaptation exclusively to the tokens of the new modality (C2). Furthermore, we introduce a novel parameter initialization scheme based on the Gromov-Wasserstein distance to improve convergence and training stability. Through an extensive analysis of the routing mechanism, we uncover the emergence of modality-specific pathways and decreased redundancy within the experts that can efficiently unlock multi-modal generative capabilities. Overall, our method can be seamlessly applied to a wide range of contemporary LLMs, providing a new pathway for transitioning from uni-modal to multi-modal architectures.

The rapid expansion of Large Language Models (LLMs) has posed significant challenges regarding the computational resources required for fine-tuning and deployment. Recent advancements in low-rank adapters have demonstrated their efficacy in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of these models. This retrospective paper comprehensively discusses innovative approaches that synergize low-rank representations with Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques, particularly weight-sharing super-networks. Robust solutions for compressing and fine-tuning large pre-trained models are developed by integrating these methodologies. Our analysis highlights the potential of these combined strategies to democratize the use of LLMs, making them more accessible for deployment in resource-constrained environments. The resulting models exhibit reduced memory footprints and faster inference times, paving the way for more practical and scalable applications of LLMs. Models and code are available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/Hardware-Aware-Automated-Machine-Learning.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) using labeled task data can significantly improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) on the downstream task. However, there are 7000 languages in the world and many of these languages lack labeled data for real-world language generation tasks. In this paper, we propose to improve zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by composing language or task specialized parameters. Our method composes language and task PEFT modules via element-wise arithmetic operations to leverage unlabeled data and English labeled data. We extend our approach to cases where labeled data from more languages is available and propose to arithmetically compose PEFT modules trained on languages related to the target. Empirical results on summarization demonstrate that our method is an effective strategy that obtains consistent gains using minimal training of PEFT modules.

With the increasing prevalence of Large Language Models, traditional full fine-tuning approaches face growing challenges, especially in memory-intensive tasks. This paper investigates the potential of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, focusing on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), for complex and under-explored multilingual summarisation tasks. We conduct an extensive study across different data availability scenarios, including full-data, low-data, and cross-lingual transfer, leveraging models of different sizes. Our findings reveal that LoRA lags behind full fine-tuning when trained with full data, however, it excels in low-data scenarios and cross-lingual transfer. Interestingly, as models scale up, the performance gap between LoRA and full fine-tuning diminishes. Additionally, we investigate effective strategies for few-shot cross-lingual transfer, finding that continued LoRA tuning achieves the best performance compared to both full fine-tuning and dynamic composition of language-specific LoRA modules.

State-of-the-art neural (re)rankers are notoriously data-hungry which -- given the lack of large-scale training data in languages other than English -- makes them rarely used in multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval settings. Current approaches therefore commonly transfer rankers trained on English data to other languages and cross-lingual setups by means of multilingual encoders: they fine-tune all parameters of pretrained massively multilingual Transformers (MMTs, e.g., multilingual BERT) on English relevance judgments, and then deploy them in the target language(s). In this work, we show that two parameter-efficient approaches to cross-lingual transfer, namely Sparse Fine-Tuning Masks (SFTMs) and Adapters, allow for a more lightweight and more effective zero-shot transfer to multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval tasks. We first train language adapters (or SFTMs) via Masked Language Modelling and then train retrieval (i.e., reranking) adapters (SFTMs) on top, while keeping all other parameters fixed. At inference, this modular design allows us to compose the ranker by applying the (re)ranking adapter (or SFTM) trained with source language data together with the language adapter (or SFTM) of a target language. We carry out a large scale evaluation on the CLEF-2003 and HC4 benchmarks and additionally, as another contribution, extend the former with queries in three new languages: Kyrgyz, Uyghur and Turkish. The proposed parameter-efficient methods outperform standard zero-shot transfer with full MMT fine-tuning, while being more modular and reducing training times. The gains are particularly pronounced for low-resource languages, where our approaches also substantially outperform the competitive machine translation-based rankers.

Large Language Models have shown remarkable capabilities in the NLP domain. Their effectiveness can mainly be attributed to their ability to adapt to an array of downstream tasks. However, generally, full fine-tuning is a computationally expensive job. To mitigate this, many techniques have been developed that prime efficiency, a prominent one being Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). However, LoRA and its variants employ re-parametrized additive updates. In this paper, we propose Low-Rank Multiplicative Adaptation (LoRMA), which shifts the paradigm of additive updates to a richer space of matrix multiplicative transformations. We tackle challenges such as computational complexity and rank bottleneck of matrix multiplication by effectively re-ordering operations and introducing rank inflation strategies. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of various evaluation metrics.

Modular deep learning has been proposed for the efficient adaption of pre-trained models to new tasks, domains and languages. In particular, combining language adapters with task adapters has shown potential where no supervised data exists for a language. In this paper, we explore the role of language adapters in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer for natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks. We study the effect of including a target-language adapter in detailed ablation studies with two multilingual models and three multilingual datasets. Our results show that the effect of target-language adapters is highly inconsistent across tasks, languages and models. Retaining the source-language adapter instead often leads to an equivalent, and sometimes to a better, performance. Removing the language adapter after training has only a weak negative effect, indicating that the language adapters do not have a strong impact on the predictions.

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.

The "massively-multilingual" training of multilingual models is known to limit their utility in any one language, and they perform particularly poorly on low-resource languages. However, there is evidence that low-resource languages can benefit from targeted multilinguality, where the model is trained on closely related languages. To test this approach more rigorously, we systematically study best practices for adapting a pre-trained model to a language family. Focusing on the Uralic family as a test case, we adapt XLM-R under various configurations to model 15 languages; we then evaluate the performance of each experimental setting on two downstream tasks and 11 evaluation languages. Our adapted models significantly outperform mono- and multilingual baselines. Furthermore, a regression analysis of hyperparameter effects reveals that adapted vocabulary size is relatively unimportant for low-resource languages, and that low-resource languages can be aggressively up-sampled during training at little detriment to performance in high-resource languages. These results introduce new best practices for performing language adaptation in a targeted setting.

With the proliferation of large pre-trained language models (PLMs), fine-tuning all model parameters becomes increasingly inefficient, particularly when dealing with numerous downstream tasks that entail substantial training and storage costs. Several approaches aimed at achieving parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) have been proposed. Among them, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) stands out as an archetypal method, incorporating trainable rank decomposition matrices into each target module. Nevertheless, LoRA does not consider the varying importance of each layer. To address these challenges, we introduce PRILoRA, which linearly allocates a different rank for each layer, in an increasing manner, and performs pruning throughout the training process, considering both the temporary magnitude of weights and the accumulated statistics of the input to any given layer. We validate the effectiveness of PRILoRA through extensive experiments on eight GLUE benchmarks, setting a new state of the art.

With the increasing size of pre-trained language models (PLMs), fine-tuning all the parameters in the model is not efficient, especially when there are a large number of downstream tasks, which incur significant training and storage costs. Many parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches have been proposed, among which, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a representative approach that injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into every target module. Yet LoRA ignores the importance of parameters in different modules. To address this problem, many works have been proposed to prune the parameters of LoRA. However, under limited training conditions, the upper bound of the rank of the pruned parameter matrix is still affected by the preset values. We, therefore, propose IncreLoRA, an incremental parameter allocation method that adaptively adds trainable parameters during training based on the importance scores of each module. This approach is different from the pruning method as it is not limited by the initial number of training parameters, and each parameter matrix has a higher rank upper bound for the same training overhead. We conduct extensive experiments on GLUE to demonstrate the effectiveness of IncreLoRA. The results show that our method owns higher parameter efficiency, especially when under the low-resource settings where our method significantly outperforms the baselines. Our code is publicly available.

Low-rank adapters have become standard for efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), but they often fall short of achieving the performance of full fine-tuning. We propose a method, LoRA Silver Bullet or LoRA-SB, that approximates full fine-tuning within low-rank subspaces using a carefully designed initialization strategy. We theoretically demonstrate that the architecture of LoRA-XS, which inserts a learnable (r x r) matrix between B and A while keeping other matrices fixed, provides the precise conditions needed for this approximation. We leverage its constrained update space to achieve optimal scaling for high-rank gradient updates while removing the need for hyperparameter tuning. We prove that our initialization offers an optimal low-rank approximation of the initial gradient and preserves update directions throughout training. Extensive experiments across mathematical reasoning, commonsense reasoning, and language understanding tasks demonstrate that our approach exceeds the performance of standard LoRA while using 27-90 times fewer learnable parameters, and comprehensively outperforms LoRA-XS. Our findings establish that it is possible to simulate full fine-tuning in low-rank subspaces, and achieve significant efficiency gains without sacrificing performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RaghavSinghal10/lora-sb.

Limited availability of multilingual text corpora for training language models often leads to poor performance on downstream tasks due to undertrained representation spaces for languages other than English. This 'under-representation' has motivated recent cross-lingual transfer methods to leverage the English representation space by e.g. mixing English and 'non-English' tokens at the input level or extending model parameters to accommodate new languages. However, these approaches often come at the cost of increased computational complexity. We propose Fusion forLanguage Representations (FLARE) in adapters, a novel method that enhances representation quality and downstream performance for languages other than English while maintaining parameter efficiency. FLARE integrates source and target language representations within low-rank (LoRA) adapters using lightweight linear transformations, maintaining parameter efficiency while improving transfer performance. A series of experiments across representative cross-lingual natural language understanding tasks, including natural language inference, question-answering and sentiment analysis, demonstrate FLARE's effectiveness. FLARE achieves performance improvements of 4.9% for Llama 3.1 and 2.2% for Gemma~2 compared to standard LoRA fine-tuning on question-answering tasks, as measured by the exact match metric.

Training a unified multilingual model promotes knowledge transfer but inevitably introduces negative interference. Language-specific modeling methods show promise in reducing interference. However, they often rely on heuristics to distribute capacity and struggle to foster cross-lingual transfer via isolated modules. In this paper, we explore intrinsic task modularity within multilingual networks and leverage these observations to circumvent interference under multilingual translation. We show that neurons in the feed-forward layers tend to be activated in a language-specific manner. Meanwhile, these specialized neurons exhibit structural overlaps that reflect language proximity, which progress across layers. Based on these findings, we propose Neuron Specialization, an approach that identifies specialized neurons to modularize feed-forward layers and then continuously updates them through sparse networks. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves consistent performance gains over strong baselines with additional analyses demonstrating reduced interference and increased knowledge transfer.

Low-resource speech recognition has been long-suffering from insufficient training data. In this paper, we propose an approach that leverages neighboring languages to improve low-resource scenario performance, founded on the hypothesis that similar linguistic units in neighboring languages exhibit comparable term frequency distributions, which enables us to construct a Huffman tree for performing multilingual hierarchical Softmax decoding. This hierarchical structure enables cross-lingual knowledge sharing among similar tokens, thereby enhancing low-resource training outcomes. Empirical analyses demonstrate that our method is effective in improving the accuracy and efficiency of low-resource speech recognition.

Open-source large language models (LLMs) have gained significant strength across diverse fields. Nevertheless, the majority of studies primarily concentrate on English, with only limited exploration into the realm of multilingual supervised fine-tuning. In this work, we therefore construct an open-source multilingual supervised fine-tuning dataset. Different from previous works that simply translate English instructions, we consider both the language-specific and language-agnostic abilities of LLMs. For language-specific abilities, we introduce a knowledge-grounded data augmentation approach to elicit more culture-specific knowledge of LLMs, improving their ability to serve users from different countries. For language-agnostic abilities, we find through experiments that modern LLMs exhibit strong cross-lingual transfer capabilities, thus repeatedly learning identical content in various languages is not necessary. Consequently, we can substantially prune the language-agnostic SFT data without any performance degradation, making the SFT process more efficient. The resulting UltraLink dataset comprises approximately 1 million samples across five languages, and the proposed data construction method can also be easily extended to other languages. UltraLink-LM, which is trained on UltraLink, outperforms several representative baselines across many tasks.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is widely used for adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains due to its efficiency and modularity. Meanwhile, vanilla LoRA struggles with task conflicts in multi-task scenarios. Recent works adopt Mixture of Experts (MoE) by treating each LoRA module as an expert, thereby mitigating task interference through multiple specialized LoRA modules. While effective, these methods often isolate knowledge within individual tasks, failing to fully exploit the shared knowledge across related tasks. In this paper, we establish a connection between single LoRA and multi-LoRA MoE, integrating them into a unified framework. We demonstrate that the dynamic routing of multiple LoRAs is functionally equivalent to rank partitioning and block-level activation within a single LoRA. We further empirically demonstrate that finer-grained LoRA partitioning, within the same total and activated parameter constraints, leads to better performance gains across heterogeneous tasks. Building on these findings, we propose Single-ranked Mixture of Experts LoRA (SMoRA), which embeds MoE into LoRA by treating each rank as an independent expert. With a dynamic rank-wise activation mechanism, SMoRA promotes finer-grained knowledge sharing while mitigating task conflicts. Experiments demonstrate that SMoRA activates fewer parameters yet achieves better performance in multi-task scenarios.

Multilingual language models are widely used to extend NLP systems to low-resource languages. However, concrete evidence for the effects of multilinguality on language modeling performance in individual languages remains scarce. Here, we pre-train over 10,000 monolingual and multilingual language models for over 250 languages, including multiple language families that are under-studied in NLP. We assess how language modeling performance in each language varies as a function of (1) monolingual dataset size, (2) added multilingual dataset size, (3) linguistic similarity of the added languages, and (4) model size (up to 45M parameters). We find that in moderation, adding multilingual data improves low-resource language modeling performance, similar to increasing low-resource dataset sizes by up to 33%. Improvements depend on the syntactic similarity of the added multilingual data, with marginal additional effects of vocabulary overlap. However, high-resource languages consistently perform worse in multilingual pre-training scenarios. As dataset sizes increase, adding multilingual data begins to hurt performance for both low-resource and high-resource languages, likely due to limited model capacity (the "curse of multilinguality"). These results suggest that massively multilingual pre-training may not be optimal for any languages involved, but that more targeted models can significantly improve performance.

Massively multilingual language models such as multilingual BERT offer state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer performance on a range of NLP tasks. However, due to limited capacity and large differences in pretraining data sizes, there is a profound performance gap between resource-rich and resource-poor target languages. The ultimate challenge is dealing with under-resourced languages not covered at all by the models and written in scripts unseen during pretraining. In this work, we propose a series of novel data-efficient methods that enable quick and effective adaptation of pretrained multilingual models to such low-resource languages and unseen scripts. Relying on matrix factorization, our methods capitalize on the existing latent knowledge about multiple languages already available in the pretrained model's embedding matrix. Furthermore, we show that learning of the new dedicated embedding matrix in the target language can be improved by leveraging a small number of vocabulary items (i.e., the so-called lexically overlapping tokens) shared between mBERT's and target language vocabulary. Our adaptation techniques offer substantial performance gains for languages with unseen scripts. We also demonstrate that they can yield improvements for low-resource languages written in scripts covered by the pretrained model.

Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have been shown to encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining. It remains an open question whether it is feasible to employ mPLMs to measure language similarity, and subsequently use the similarity results to select source languages for boosting cross-lingual transfer. To investigate this, we propose mPLMSim, a language similarity measure that induces the similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora. Our study shows that mPLM-Sim exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, such as lexicostatistics, genealogical language family, and geographical sprachbund. We also conduct a case study on languages with low correlation and observe that mPLM-Sim yields more accurate similarity results. Additionally, we find that similarity results vary across different mPLMs and different layers within an mPLM. We further investigate whether mPLMSim is effective for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by conducting experiments on both low-level syntactic tasks and high-level semantic tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that mPLM-Sim is capable of selecting better source languages than linguistic measures, resulting in a 1%-2% improvement in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance.

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are composed of matrices with billions of elements, making their storage and processing quite demanding in terms of computational resources and memory usage. Being significantly large, such matrices can often be expressed in low-rank format with potential to relax resource requirements. Unlike prior works which focus on developing novel matrix decomposition algorithms, in this work we first study the emergence of low-rank structures across matrices within different layers of LLMs and establish a consequential relationship between the gradient dynamics and emerging low-rank expressiveness of matrices. Our findings reveal that different layers exhibit varying levels of converged low-rank structure, necessitating a non-uniform rank reduction across them to minimize performance drop due to compression. In view of that, we present Weight Low-Rank Projection (WeLore) that unifies weight compression and memory-efficient fine-tuning as ONE, in a data-agnostic and one-shot way. WeLore capitalizes the heavy-tail distribution of singular values to identify a suitable rank reduction ratio for matrices within LLMs. Going beyond only as a compression technique, WeLore categorizes weight matrices into Low-rank Components (LRCs) and Non-Low-rank Components (N-LRCs) based on their ability to express themselves as low-rank. Our gradient perspective and extensive experiments illustrate that LRCs tend to have better finetuning capabilities and can closely mimic (sometimes outperform) the training loss trajectory and performance of full-finetuning with notable memory and compute footprint reduction. For example, finetuning a 50\% compressed LLaMa-2 7B model using only a fraction of parameters in LRCs (WeLore) can outperform its full finetuning with ~3x better throughput and ~0.6x GPU requirement. Our codes are available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/welore

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is a popular method for tailoring pre-trained large language models (LLMs), especially as the models' scale and the diversity of tasks increase. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is based on the idea that the adaptation process is intrinsically low-dimensional, i.e., significant model changes can be represented with relatively few parameters. However, decreasing the rank encounters challenges with generalization errors for specific tasks when compared to full-parameter fine-tuning. We present MELoRA, a mini-ensemble low-rank adapters that uses fewer trainable parameters while maintaining a higher rank, thereby offering improved performance potential. The core idea is to freeze original pretrained weights and train a group of mini LoRAs with only a small number of parameters. This can capture a significant degree of diversity among mini LoRAs, thus promoting better generalization ability. We conduct a theoretical analysis and empirical studies on various NLP tasks. Our experimental results show that, compared to LoRA, MELoRA achieves better performance with 8 times fewer trainable parameters on natural language understanding tasks and 36 times fewer trainable parameters on instruction following tasks, which demonstrates the effectiveness of MELoRA.

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has been developed as an efficient approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) by fine-tuning two low-rank matrices, thereby reducing the number of trainable parameters. However, prior research indicates that many of the weights in these matrices are redundant, leading to inefficiencies in parameter utilization. To address this limitation, we introduce Dense Low-Rank Adaptation (DenseLoRA), a novel approach that enhances parameter efficiency while achieving superior performance compared to LoRA. DenseLoRA builds upon the concept of representation fine-tuning, incorporating a single Encoder-Decoder to refine and compress hidden representations across all adaptation layers before applying adaptation. Instead of relying on two redundant low-rank matrices as in LoRA, DenseLoRA adapts LLMs through a dense low-rank matrix, improving parameter utilization and adaptation efficiency. We evaluate DenseLoRA on various benchmarks, showing that it achieves 83.8% accuracy with only 0.01% of trainable parameters, compared to LoRA's 80.8% accuracy with 0.70% of trainable parameters on LLaMA3-8B. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments to systematically assess the impact of DenseLoRA's components on overall model performance. Code is available at https://github.com/mulin-ahu/DenseLoRA.

Adapters and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques designed to make the training of language models more efficient. Previous results demonstrated that these methods can even improve performance on some classification tasks. This paper complements the existing research by investigating how these techniques influence the classification performance and computation costs compared to full fine-tuning when applied to multilingual text classification tasks (genre, framing, and persuasion techniques detection; with different input lengths, number of predicted classes and classification difficulty), some of which have limited training data. In addition, we conduct in-depth analyses of their efficacy across different training scenarios (training on the original multilingual data; on the translations into English; and on a subset of English-only data) and different languages. Our findings provide valuable insights into the applicability of the parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques, particularly to complex multilingual and multilabel classification tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous tasks. However, these advancements have predominantly benefited "first-class" languages such as English and Chinese, leaving many other languages underrepresented. This imbalance, while limiting broader applications, generates a natural preference ranking between languages, offering an opportunity to bootstrap the multilingual capabilities of LLM in a self-improving manner. Thus, we propose Language Imbalance Driven Rewarding, where the inherent imbalance between dominant and non-dominant languages within LLMs is leveraged as a reward signal. Iterative DPO training demonstrates that this approach not only enhances LLM performance in non-dominant languages but also improves the dominant language's capacity, thereby yielding an iterative reward signal. Fine-tuning Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct over two iterations of this approach results in continuous improvements in multilingual performance across instruction-following and arithmetic reasoning tasks, evidenced by an average improvement of 7.46% win rate on the X-AlpacaEval leaderboard and 13.9% accuracy on the MGSM benchmark. This work serves as an initial exploration, paving the way for multilingual self-improvement of LLMs.

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) presents a dual challenge of balancing parameter efficiency and model capacity. Existing methods like low-rank adaptations (LoRA) are efficient but lack flexibility, while Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enhance model capacity at the cost of more & under-utilized parameters. To address these limitations, we propose Structural Mixture of Residual Experts (S'MoRE), a novel framework that seamlessly integrates the efficiency of LoRA with the flexibility of MoE. Specifically, S'MoRE employs hierarchical low-rank decomposition of expert weights, yielding residuals of varying orders interconnected in a multi-layer structure. By routing input tokens through sub-trees of residuals, S'MoRE emulates the capacity of many experts by instantiating and assembling just a few low-rank matrices. We craft the inter-layer propagation of S'MoRE's residuals as a special type of Graph Neural Network (GNN), and prove that under similar parameter budget, S'MoRE improves "structural flexibility" of traditional MoE (or Mixture-of-LoRA) by exponential order. Comprehensive theoretical analysis and empirical results demonstrate that S'MoRE achieves superior fine-tuning performance, offering a transformative approach for efficient LLM adaptation.

The Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have been extensively researched for large language models in the downstream tasks. Among all the existing approaches, the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has gained popularity for its streamlined design by incorporating low-rank matrices into existing pre-trained models. Though effective, LoRA allocates every module an identical low-rank matrix, which ignores the varying properties and contributions across different components. Moreover, the existing adaptive LoRA solutions rely highly on intuitive importance scoring indicators to adjust the interior rank of the decomposition matrices. In this paper, we propose a new PEFT scheme called DiffoRA, which is theoretically grounded and enables module-wise adoption of LoRA. At the core of our DiffoRA lies a Differential Adaptation Matrix (DAM) to determine which module is the most suitable and essential for fine-tuning. We explain how the designed matrix impacts the convergence rate and generalization capability of a pre-trained model. Furthermore, we construct the DAM via continuous relaxation and discretization with weight-sharing optimizations. We fully implement our DiffoRA and design comprehensive experiments to evaluate its performance. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves the best model accuracy over all the state-of-the-art baselines across various benchmarks.

Pretraining multilingual language models from scratch requires considerable computational resources and substantial training data. Therefore, a more efficient method is to adapt existing pretrained language models (PLMs) to new languages via vocabulary extension and continued pretraining. However, this method usually randomly initializes the embeddings of new subwords and introduces substantially more embedding parameters to the language model, thus weakening the efficiency. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework: One For All (\textsc{Ofa}), which wisely initializes the embeddings of unseen subwords from target languages and thus can adapt a PLM to multiple languages efficiently and effectively. Ofa takes advantage of external well-aligned multilingual word embeddings and injects the alignment knowledge into the new embeddings. In addition, Ofa applies matrix factorization and replaces the cumbersome embeddings with two lower-dimensional matrices, which significantly reduces the number of parameters while not sacrificing the performance. Through extensive experiments, we show models initialized by Ofa are efficient and outperform several baselines. Ofa not only accelerates the convergence of continued pretraining, which is friendly to a limited computation budget, but also improves the zero-shot crosslingual transfer on a wide range of downstream tasks. We make our code and models publicly available.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable in real-world applications. However, their widespread adoption raises significant safety concerns, particularly in responding to socially harmful questions. Despite substantial efforts to improve model safety through alignment, aligned models can still have their safety protections undermined by subsequent fine-tuning - even when the additional training data appears benign. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that this vulnerability stems from the sensitivity of safety-critical low-rank subspaces in LLM parameters to fine-tuning. Building on this insight, we propose a novel training-free method, termed Low-Rank Extrapolation (LoX), to enhance safety robustness by extrapolating the safety subspace of an aligned LLM. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of LoX, demonstrating significant improvements in robustness against both benign and malicious fine-tuning attacks while preserving the model's adaptability to new tasks. For instance, LoX leads to 11% to 54% absolute reductions in attack success rates (ASR) facing benign or malicious fine-tuning attacks. By investigating the ASR landscape of parameters, we attribute the success of LoX to that the extrapolation moves LLM parameters to a flatter zone, thereby less sensitive to perturbations. The code is available at github.com/VITA-Group/LoX.

The world's more than 7000 languages are written in at least 293 scripts. Due to various reasons, many closely related languages use different scripts, which poses a difficulty for multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) in learning crosslingual knowledge through lexical overlap. As a consequence, mPLMs are faced with a script barrier: representations from different scripts are located in different subspaces, which can result in crosslingual transfer involving languages of different scripts performing suboptimally. To address this problem, we propose TransliCo, a framework that optimizes the Transliteration Contrastive Modeling (TCM) objective to fine-tune an mPLM by contrasting sentences in its training data and their transliterations in a unified script (in our case Latin), which enhances uniformity in the representation space for different scripts. Using Glot500-m, an mPLM pretrained on over 500 languages, as our source model, we fine-tune it on a small portion (5%) of its training data, and refer to the resulting model as Furina. We show that Furina not only better aligns representations from distinct scripts but also outperforms the original Glot500-m on various zero-shot crosslingual transfer tasks. Additionally, we achieve consistent improvement in a case study on the Indic group where the languages exhibit areal features but use different scripts. We make our code and models publicly available.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages, such as those in the Finno-Ugric family, significantly underrepresented. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on V\~oro, Livonian, and Komi. We cover almost the entire cycle of LLM creation, from data collection to instruction tuning and evaluation. Our contributions include developing multilingual base and instruction-tuned models; creating evaluation benchmarks, including the smugri-MT-bench multi-turn conversational benchmark; and conducting human evaluation. We intend for this work to promote linguistic diversity, ensuring that lesser-resourced languages can benefit from advancements in NLP.

Despite the impressive performance recently achieved by automatic speech recognition (ASR), we observe two primary challenges that hinder its broader applications: (1) The difficulty of introducing scalability into the model to support more languages with limited training, inference, and storage overhead; (2) The low-resource adaptation ability that enables effective low-resource adaptation while avoiding over-fitting and catastrophic forgetting issues. Inspired by recent findings, we hypothesize that we can address the above challenges with modules widely shared across languages. To this end, we propose an ASR framework, dubbed \METHODNS, that, for the first time, simultaneously achieves strong multilingual scalability and low-resource adaptation ability thanks to its modularize-then-assemble strategy. Specifically, \METHOD learns a small set of generalizable sub-modules and adaptively assembles them for different languages to reduce the multilingual overhead and enable effective knowledge transfer for low-resource adaptation. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate that \METHOD can effectively discover language similarity and improve multilingual and low-resource ASR performance over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, e.g., under multilingual-ASR, our framework achieves a 0.13sim2.41 lower character error rate (CER) with 30\% smaller inference overhead over SOTA solutions on multilingual ASR and a comparable CER, with nearly 50 times fewer trainable parameters over SOTA solutions on low-resource tuning, respectively.

Large language models (LLMs) typically utilize the top-k contexts from a retriever in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In this work, we propose a novel instruction fine-tuning framework RankRAG, which instruction-tunes a single LLM for the dual purpose of context ranking and answer generation in RAG. In particular, the instruction-tuned LLMs work surprisingly well by adding a small fraction of ranking data into the training blend, and outperform existing expert ranking models, including the same LLM exclusively fine-tuned on a large amount of ranking data. For generation, we compare our model with many strong baselines, including GPT-4-0613, GPT-4-turbo-2024-0409, and ChatQA-1.5, an open-sourced model with the state-of-the-art performance on RAG benchmarks. Specifically, our Llama3-RankRAG significantly outperforms Llama3-ChatQA-1.5 and GPT-4 models on nine knowledge-intensive benchmarks. In addition, it also performs comparably to GPT-4 on five RAG benchmarks in the biomedical domain without instruction fine-tuning on biomedical data, demonstrating its superb capability for generalization to new domains.

In multi-task learning, the conventional approach involves training a model on multiple tasks simultaneously. However, the training signals from different tasks can interfere with one another, potentially leading to negative transfer. To mitigate this, we investigate if modular language models can facilitate positive transfer and systematic generalization. Specifically, we propose a novel modular language model (TensorPoly), that balances parameter efficiency with nuanced routing methods. For modules, we reparameterize Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) by employing an entangled tensor through the use of tensor product operations and name the resulting approach TLoRA. For routing function, we tailor two innovative routing functions according to the granularity: TensorPoly-I which directs to each rank within the entangled tensor while TensorPoly-II offers a finer-grained routing approach targeting each order of the entangled tensor. The experimental results from the multi-task T0-benchmark demonstrate that: 1) all modular LMs surpass the corresponding dense approaches, highlighting the potential of modular language models to mitigate negative inference in multi-task learning and deliver superior outcomes. 2) TensorPoly-I achieves higher parameter efficiency in adaptation and outperforms other modular LMs, which shows the potential of our approach in multi-task transfer learning.

Contextualized embeddings based on large language models (LLMs) are available for various languages, but their coverage is often limited for lower resourced languages. Training LLMs for such languages is often difficult due to insufficient data and high computational cost. Especially for very low resource languages, static word embeddings thus still offer a viable alternative. There is, however, a notable lack of comprehensive repositories with such embeddings for diverse languages. To address this, we present LowREm, a centralized repository of static embeddings for 87 low-resource languages. We also propose a novel method to enhance GloVe-based embeddings by integrating multilingual graph knowledge, utilizing another source of knowledge. We demonstrate the superior performance of our enhanced embeddings as compared to contextualized embeddings extracted from XLM-R on sentiment analysis. Our code and data are publicly available under https://huggingface.co/DFKI.

While multilingual language models like XLM-R have advanced multilingualism in NLP, they still perform poorly in extremely low-resource languages. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that modern LLMs such as LLaMA and Qwen support far fewer languages than XLM-R, making text generation models non-existent for many languages in the world. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel framework for adapting multilingual encoders to text generation in extremely low-resource languages. By reusing the weights between the encoder and the decoder, our framework allows the model to leverage the learned semantic space of the encoder, enabling efficient learning and effective generalization in low-resource languages. Applying this framework to four Chinese minority languages, we present XLM-SWCM, and demonstrate its superior performance on various downstream tasks even when compared with much larger 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.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) provides an effective yet efficient solution for fine-tuning large language models (LLM). The modular and plug-and-play nature of LoRA enables the integration of diverse domain-specific LoRAs to enhance the capabilities of LLMs. Previous research on exploiting multiple LoRAs either focuses on specific isolated downstream tasks or fixes the selection of LoRAs during training. However, in real-world scenarios, LLMs receive diverse prompts covering different tasks, and the pool of candidate LoRAs is often dynamically updated. To bridge this gap, we propose LoraRetriever, a retrieve-then-compose framework that adaptively retrieves and composes multiple LoRAs according to the input prompts. LoraRetriever contains three main components: firstly, identifying and retrieving LoRAs relevant to the given input; secondly, formulating strategies for effectively integrating the retrieved LoRAs; and thirdly, developing efficient batch inference to accommodate heterogeneous requests. Experimental results indicate that LoraRetriever consistently outperforms the baselines, highlighting its practical effectiveness and versatility.

Large language models are trained on massive scrapes of the web, as required by current scaling laws. Most progress is made for English, given its abundance of high-quality pretraining data. For most other languages, however, such high quality pretraining data is unavailable. In this work, we study how to boost pretrained model performance in a data constrained target language by enlisting data from an auxiliary language for which high quality data is available. We study this by quantifying the performance gap between training with data in a data-rich auxiliary language compared with training in the target language, exploring the benefits of translation systems, studying the limitations of model scaling for data constrained languages, and proposing new methods for upsampling data from the auxiliary language. Our results show that stronger auxiliary datasets result in performance gains without modification to the model or training objective for close languages, and, in particular, that performance gains due to the development of more information-rich English pretraining datasets can extend to targeted language settings with limited data.

While pretrained language models (PLMs) primarily serve as general-purpose text encoders that can be fine-tuned for a wide variety of downstream tasks, recent work has shown that they can also be rewired to produce high-quality word representations (i.e., static word embeddings) and yield good performance in type-level lexical tasks. While existing work primarily focused on the lexical specialization of monolingual PLMs with immense quantities of monolingual constraints, in this work we expose massively multilingual transformers (MMTs, e.g., mBERT or XLM-R) to multilingual lexical knowledge at scale, leveraging BabelNet as the readily available rich source of multilingual and cross-lingual type-level lexical knowledge. Concretely, we use BabelNet's multilingual synsets to create synonym pairs (or synonym-gloss pairs) across 50 languages and then subject the MMTs (mBERT and XLM-R) to a lexical specialization procedure guided by a contrastive objective. We show that such massively multilingual lexical specialization brings substantial gains in two standard cross-lingual lexical tasks, bilingual lexicon induction and cross-lingual word similarity, as well as in cross-lingual sentence retrieval. Crucially, we observe gains for languages unseen in specialization, indicating that multilingual lexical specialization enables generalization to languages with no lexical constraints. In a series of subsequent controlled experiments, we show that the number of specialization constraints plays a much greater role than the set of languages from which they originate.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is the bread and butter of Large Language Model (LLM) finetuning. LoRA learns an additive low-rank perturbation, AB, of a pretrained matrix parameter W to align the model to a new task or dataset with W+AB. We identify three core limitations to LoRA for finetuning--a setting that employs limited amount of data and training steps. First, LoRA employs Dropout to prevent overfitting. We prove that Dropout is only suitable for long training episodes but fails to converge to a reliable regularizer for short training episodes. Second, LoRA's initialization of B at 0 creates a slow training dynamic between A and B. That dynamic is also exacerbated by Dropout that further slows the escape from 0 for B which is particularly harmful for short training episodes. Third, the scaling factor multiplying each LoRA additive perturbation creates ``short-sighted'' interactions between the LoRA modules of different layers. Motivated by principled analysis of those limitations, we find an elegant solution: a Dropout-free, scaling-free, LoRA with Adaptive Learning rate--coined ALLoRA. By scaling the per sample and per parameter gradients with a coefficient inversely proportional to parameters' ell_2 norm, ALLoRA alleviates those three limitations. As a by-product, ALLoRA removes two hyper-parameters from LoRA: the scaling factor and the dropout rate. Empirical results show that ALLoRA admits better accuracy than LoRA on various settings, including against recent LoRA variants such as Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA). Ablation studies show our solution is the optimal in a family of weight-dependent / output-dependent approaches on various LLMs including the latest Llama3.

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, creating an increased need for efficient, task-specific fine-tuning methods. Traditional fine-tuning of LLMs involves updating a large number of parameters, which is computationally expensive and memory-intensive. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a promising solution, enabling parameter-efficient fine-tuning by reducing the number of trainable parameters. However, while LoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters, LoRA modules still create significant storage challenges. We propose LoRA-Mini, an optimized adaptation of LoRA that improves parameter efficiency by splitting low-rank matrices into four parts, with only the two inner matrices being trainable. This approach achieves upto a 20x reduction compared to standard LoRA in the number of trainable parameters while preserving performance levels comparable to standard LoRA, addressing both computational and storage efficiency in LLM fine-tuning.

Large language models (LLMs) are known to effectively perform tasks by simply observing few exemplars. However, in low-resource languages, obtaining such hand-picked exemplars can still be challenging, where unsupervised techniques may be necessary. Moreover, competent generative capabilities of LLMs are observed only in high-resource languages, while their performances among under-represented languages fall behind due to pre-training data imbalance. To elicit LLMs' ability onto low-resource languages without any supervised data, we propose to assemble synthetic exemplars from a diverse set of high-resource languages to prompt the LLMs to translate from any language into English. These prompts are then used to create intra-lingual exemplars to perform tasks in the target languages. Our unsupervised prompting method performs on par with supervised few-shot learning in LLMs of different sizes for translations between English and 13 Indic and 21 African low-resource languages. We also show that fine-tuning a 7B model on data generated from our method helps it perform competitively with a 175B model. In non-English translation tasks, our method even outperforms supervised prompting by up to 3 chrF++ in many low-resource languages. When evaluated on zero-shot multilingual summarization, our method surpasses other English-pivoting baselines by up to 4 ROUGE-L and is also favored by GPT-4.

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained predominantly on extensive English data, often exhibit limitations when applied to other languages. Current research is primarily focused on enhancing the multilingual capabilities of these models by employing various tuning strategies. Despite their effectiveness in certain languages, the understanding of the multilingual abilities of LLMs remains incomplete. This study endeavors to evaluate the multilingual capacity of LLMs by conducting an exhaustive analysis across 101 languages, and classifies languages with similar characteristics into four distinct quadrants. By delving into each quadrant, we shed light on the rationale behind their categorization and offer actionable guidelines for tuning these languages. Extensive experiments reveal that existing LLMs possess multilingual capabilities that surpass our expectations, and we can significantly improve the multilingual performance of LLMs by focusing on these distinct attributes present in each quadrant.

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of numerous specialized, task-specific variants. However, the maintenance and deployment of these individual models present substantial challenges in terms of resource utilization and operational efficiency. In this work, we propose the Mixture of Distributions (MoD) framework, a novel approach for merging LLMs that operates directly on their output probability distributions, rather than on model weights. Unlike traditional weight-averaging methods, MoD effectively preserves the specialized capabilities of individual models while enabling efficient knowledge sharing across tasks. Through extensive experimentation on mathematical reasoning benchmarks using Qwen2.5 models, we demonstrate that MoD significantly outperforms existing model merging techniques across multiple benchmarks. All code, data, and experimental materials are published at https://github.com/knovel-eng/mod.

Using LLMs (Large Language Models) in conjunction with external documents has made RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) an essential technology. Numerous techniques and modules for RAG are being researched, but their performance can vary across different datasets. Finding RAG modules that perform well on specific datasets is challenging. In this paper, we propose the AutoRAG framework, which automatically identifies suitable RAG modules for a given dataset. AutoRAG explores and approximates the optimal combination of RAG modules for the dataset. Additionally, we share the results of optimizing a dataset using AutoRAG. All experimental results and data are publicly available and can be accessed through our GitHub repository https://github.com/Marker-Inc-Korea/AutoRAG_ARAGOG_Paper .

Despite the significant progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their high computational cost remains a barrier to real-world deployment. Inspired by the mixture of depths (MoDs) in natural language processing, we aim to address this limitation from the perspective of ``activated tokens''. Our key insight is that if most tokens are redundant for the layer computation, then can be skipped directly via the MoD layer. However, directly converting the dense layers of MLLMs to MoD layers leads to substantial performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose an innovative MoD adaptation strategy for existing MLLMs called gamma-MoD. In gamma-MoD, a novel metric is proposed to guide the deployment of MoDs in the MLLM, namely rank of attention maps (ARank). Through ARank, we can effectively identify which layer is redundant and should be replaced with the MoD layer. Based on ARank, we further propose two novel designs to maximize the computational sparsity of MLLM while maintaining its performance, namely shared vision-language router and masked routing learning. With these designs, more than 90% dense layers of the MLLM can be effectively converted to the MoD ones. To validate our method, we apply it to three popular MLLMs, and conduct extensive experiments on 9 benchmark datasets. Experimental results not only validate the significant efficiency benefit of gamma-MoD to existing MLLMs but also confirm its generalization ability on various MLLMs. For example, with a minor performance drop, i.e., -1.5%, gamma-MoD can reduce the training and inference time of LLaVA-HR by 31.0% and 53.2%, respectively.

Fine-tuning pretrained LLMs has been shown to be an effective strategy for reaching state-of-the-art performance on specific tasks like machine translation. However, this process of adaptation often implies sacrificing general-purpose capabilities, such as conversational reasoning and instruction-following, hampering the utility of the system in real-world applications that require a mixture of skills. In this paper, we introduce Tower+, a suite of models designed to deliver strong performance across both translation and multilingual general-purpose text capabilities. We achieve a Pareto frontier between translation specialization and multilingual general-purpose capabilities by introducing a novel training recipe that builds on Tower (Alves et al., 2024), comprising continued pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. At each stage of training, we carefully generate and curate data to strengthen performance on translation as well as general-purpose tasks involving code generation, mathematics problem solving, and general instruction-following. We develop models at multiple scales: 2B, 9B, and 72B. Our smaller models often outperform larger general-purpose open-weight and proprietary LLMs (e.g., Llama 3.3 70B, GPT-4o). Our largest model delivers best-in-class translation performance for high-resource languages and top results in multilingual Arena Hard evaluations and in IF-MT, a benchmark we introduce for evaluating both translation and instruction-following. Our findings highlight that it is possible to rival frontier models in general capabilities, while optimizing for specific business domains, such as translation and localization.

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on many tasks is greatly limited by the knowledge learned during pre-training and stored in the model's parameters. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a popular and efficient training technique for updating or domain-specific adaptation of LLMs. In this study, we investigate how new facts can be incorporated into the LLM using LoRA without compromising the previously learned knowledge. We fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-instruct using LoRA with varying amounts of new knowledge. Our experiments have shown that the best results are obtained when the training data contains a mixture of known and new facts. However, this approach is still potentially harmful because the model's performance on external question-answering benchmarks declines after such fine-tuning. When the training data is biased towards certain entities, the model tends to regress to few overrepresented answers. In addition, we found that the model becomes more confident and refuses to provide an answer in only few cases. These findings highlight the potential pitfalls of LoRA-based LLM updates and underscore the importance of training data composition and tuning parameters to balance new knowledge integration and general model capabilities.

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, are versatile and can solve different tasks due to their emergent ability and generalizability. However, LLMs sometimes lack domain-specific knowledge to perform tasks, which would also cause hallucination during inference. In some previous works, additional modules like graph neural networks (GNNs) are trained on retrieved knowledge from external knowledge bases, aiming to mitigate the problem of lacking domain-specific knowledge. However, incorporating additional modules: 1) would need retraining additional modules when encountering novel domains; 2) would become a bottleneck since LLMs' strong abilities are not fully utilized for retrieval. In this paper, we propose a paradigm, termed Knowledge Solver (KSL), to teach LLMs to search for essential knowledge from external knowledge bases by harnessing their own strong generalizability. Specifically, we design a simple yet effective prompt to transform retrieval into a multi-hop decision sequence, which empowers LLMs with searching knowledge ability in zero-shot manner. Additionally, KSL is able to provide complete retrieval paths and therefore increase explainability of LLMs' reasoning processes. We conduct experiments on three datasets: CommonsenseQA, OpenbookQA, and MedQA-USMLE, and found that our approach improves LLM baseline performance by a relatively large margin.

Low-rank optimization has emerged as a promising direction in training large language models (LLMs) to reduce the memory usage of adaptive optimizers by constraining learning to a lower-dimensional space. Prior work typically projects gradients of linear layers using approaches based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). However, applying SVD-based procedures individually to each layer in large models is computationally expensive and incurs additional memory costs due to storing the projection matrices. In this work, we propose a computationally efficient and conceptually simple two-step procedure to approximate SVD-based gradient projections into lower-dimensional spaces. First, we construct a complete orthogonal basis using predefined orthogonal matrices of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Second, we adaptively select basis columns based on their alignment with the gradient of each layer. Each projection matrix in our method is obtained via a single matrix multiplication followed by a lightweight sorting step to identify the most relevant basis vectors. Due to the predefined nature of the orthogonal bases, they are computed once at the start of training. During training, we store only the indices of the selected columns, avoiding the need to store full projection matrices for each layer. Our numerical experiments on both pre-training and fine-tuning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our dual strategy in approximating optimal low-rank projections, matching the performance of costly SVD-based methods while achieving faster runtime and reduced memory usage.

Low-rank approximation techniques have become the de facto standard for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their reduced computational and memory requirements. This paper investigates the effectiveness of these methods in capturing the shift of fine-tuning datasets from the initial pre-trained data distribution. Our findings reveal that there are cases in which low-rank fine-tuning falls short in learning such shifts. This, in turn, produces non-negligible side effects, especially when fine-tuning is adopted for toxicity mitigation in pre-trained models, or in scenarios where it is important to provide fair models. Through comprehensive empirical evidence on several models, datasets, and tasks, we show that low-rank fine-tuning inadvertently preserves undesirable biases and toxic behaviors. We also show that this extends to sequential decision-making tasks, emphasizing the need for careful evaluation to promote responsible LLMs development.

Fueled by their remarkable ability to tackle diverse tasks across multiple domains, large language models (LLMs) have grown at an unprecedented rate, with some recent models containing trillions of parameters. This growth is accompanied by substantial computational challenges, particularly regarding the memory and compute resources required for training and fine-tuning. Numerous approaches have been explored to address these issues, such as LoRA. While these methods are effective for fine-tuning, their application to pre-training is significantly more challenging due to the need to learn vast datasets. Motivated by this issue, we aim to address the following questions: Can parameter- or memory-efficient methods enhance pre-training efficiency while achieving performance comparable to full-model training? How can the performance gap be narrowed? To this end, the contributions of this work are the following. (1) We begin by conducting a comprehensive survey that summarizes state-of-the-art methods for efficient pre-training. (2) We perform a benchmark evaluation of several representative memory efficient pre-training approaches to comprehensively evaluate their performance across model sizes. We observe that with a proper choice of optimizer and hyperparameters, full-rank training delivers the best performance, as expected. We also notice that incorporating high-rank updates in low-rank approaches is the key to improving their performance. (3) Finally, we propose two practical techniques, namely weight refactorization and momentum reset, to enhance the performance of efficient pre-training methods. We observe that applying these techniques to the low-rank method (on a 1B model) can achieve a lower perplexity than popular memory efficient algorithms such as GaLore and Fira, while simultaneously using about 25% less memory.

Large language model (LLM) is considered a milestone towards achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With its advanced emergent capabilities, it adapt to a wide range of specific applications. Fine-tuning LLMs for various downstream tasks has become a new paradigm. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is well-known for its parameter efficiency. It can reduce the number of parameters needed to fine-tune LLMs by several orders of magnitude. However, LoRA-based approaches encounter a significant limitation due to the bottleneck imposed by rank one decomposition. As the parameters count in LLMs increase, even rank one decomposition might surpass the number of parameters truly necessary for handling more downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a new method for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) via deconvolution in subspace, dubbed as DCFT. We innovatively use deconvolution to complete details and enhance knowledge in subspace incremental matrices, and dynamically control parameters by adjusting the kernel size, unconstrained by rank-one decomposition. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of DCFT. Results show that compared to LoRA, DCFT achieve an 8times reduction in parameters, and still achieves highly impressive performance. Our code is available here: https://github.com/Godz-z/DCFT.

Training high-performing Small Language Models (SLMs) remains costly, even with knowledge distillation and pruning from larger teacher models. Existing work often faces three key challenges: (1) information loss from hard pruning, (2) inefficient alignment of representations, and (3) underutilization of informative activations, particularly from Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs). To address these challenges, we introduce Low-Rank Clone (LRC), an efficient pre-training method that constructs SLMs aspiring to behavioral equivalence with strong teacher models. LRC trains a set of low-rank projection matrices that jointly enable soft pruning by compressing teacher weights, and activation clone by aligning student activations, including FFN signals, with those of the teacher. This unified design maximizes knowledge transfer while removing the need for explicit alignment modules. Extensive experiments with open-source teachers (e.g., Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-3B/7B-Instruct) show that LRC matches or surpasses state-of-the-art models trained on trillions of tokens--while using only 20B tokens, achieving over 1,000x training efficiency. Our codes and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/CURRENTF/LowRankClone and https://huggingface.co/collections/JitaiHao/low-rank-clone-lrc-6828389e96a93f1d4219dfaf.

Leveraging research on the neural modelling of Portuguese, we contribute a collection of datasets for an array of language processing tasks and a corresponding collection of fine-tuned neural language models on these downstream tasks. To align with mainstream benchmarks in the literature, originally developed in English, and to kick start their Portuguese counterparts, the datasets were machine-translated from English with a state-of-the-art translation engine. The resulting PORTULAN ExtraGLUE benchmark is a basis for research on Portuguese whose improvement can be pursued in future work. Similarly, the respective fine-tuned neural language models, developed with a low-rank adaptation approach, are made available as baselines that can stimulate future work on the neural processing of Portuguese. All datasets and models have been developed and are made available for two variants of Portuguese: European and Brazilian.

The extrapolation capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Rotary Position Embedding is currently a topic of considerable interest. The mainstream approach to addressing extrapolation with LLMs involves modifying RoPE by replacing 10000, the rotary base of theta_n={10000}^{-2n/d} in the original RoPE, with a larger value and providing longer fine-tuning text. In this work, we first observe that fine-tuning a RoPE-based LLM with either a smaller or larger base in pre-training context length could significantly enhance its extrapolation performance. After that, we propose \textit{Scaling Laws of RoPE-based Extrapolation}, a unified framework from the periodic perspective, to describe the relationship between the extrapolation performance and base value as well as tuning context length. In this process, we also explain the origin of the RoPE-based extrapolation issue by \textit{critical dimension for extrapolation}. Besides these observations and analyses, we achieve extrapolation up to 1 million context length within only 16K training length on LLaMA2 7B and 13B.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly bringing advances to Natural Language Processing. However, low-resource languages, those lacking extensive prominence in datasets for various NLP tasks, or where existing datasets are not as substantial, such as Portuguese, already obtain several benefits from LLMs, but not to the same extent. LLMs trained on multilingual datasets normally struggle to respond to prompts in Portuguese satisfactorily, presenting, for example, code switching in their responses. This work proposes a fine-tuned LLaMA 2-based model for Portuguese prompts named Bode in two versions: 7B and 13B. We evaluate the performance of this model in classification tasks using the zero-shot approach with in-context learning, and compare it with other LLMs. Our main contribution is to bring an LLM with satisfactory results in the Portuguese language, as well as to provide a model that is free for research or commercial purposes.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), yet open-source multilingual LLMs remain scarce, with existing models often limited in language coverage. Such models typically prioritize well-resourced languages, while widely spoken but under-resourced languages are often overlooked. To address this disparity, we introduce Babel, an open multilingual LLM that covers the top 25 languages by number of speakers, supports over 90% of the global population, and includes many languages neglected by other open multilingual LLMs. Unlike traditional continue pretraining approaches, Babel expands its parameter count through a layer extension technique that elevates Babel's performance ceiling. We introduce two variants: Babel-9B, designed for efficient inference and fine-tuning, and Babel-83B, which sets a new standard for open multilingual LLMs. Extensive evaluations on multilingual tasks demonstrate its superior performance compared to open LLMs of comparable size. In addition, using open-source supervised fine-tuning datasets, Babel achieves remarkable performance, with Babel-9B-Chat leading among 10B-sized LLMs and Babel-83B-Chat setting a new standard for multilingual tasks, reaching the same level of commercial models.

Based on the foundation of Large Language Models (LLMs), Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been developed to address the challenges of multilingual natural language processing tasks, hoping to achieve knowledge transfer from high-resource to low-resource languages. However, significant limitations and challenges still exist, such as language imbalance, multilingual alignment, and inherent bias. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of MLLMs, delving deeply into discussions surrounding these critical issues. First of all, we start by presenting an overview of MLLMs, covering their evolution, key techniques, and multilingual capacities. Secondly, we explore widely utilized multilingual corpora for MLLMs' training and multilingual datasets oriented for downstream tasks that are crucial for enhancing the cross-lingual capability of MLLMs. Thirdly, we survey the existing studies on multilingual representations and investigate whether the current MLLMs can learn a universal language representation. Fourthly, we discuss bias on MLLMs including its category and evaluation metrics, and summarize the existing debiasing techniques. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and point out promising research directions. By demonstrating these aspects, this paper aims to facilitate a deeper understanding of MLLMs and their potentiality in various domains.

Dataset curation has become a basis for strong large language model (LLM) performance. While various rule-based filtering heuristics exist for English and multilingual datasets, model-based filtering techniques have primarily focused on English. To address the disparity stemming from limited research on non-English languages, we propose a model-based filtering framework for multilingual datasets that aims to identify a diverse set of structured and knowledge-rich samples. Our approach emphasizes transparency, simplicity, and efficiency, leveraging Transformer- and FastText-based classifiers to ensure the broad accessibility of our technique and data. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies on the FineWeb-2 web crawl dataset across diverse language families, scripts, and resource availability to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Training a 1B-parameter Llama model for 70B and 119B tokens, our approach can match the baseline MMLU score with as little as 15% of the training tokens, while also improving across other benchmarks. These findings provide strong evidence for the generalizability of our approach to other languages. As a result, we extend our framework to 20 languages for which we release the refined pretraining datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong effectiveness and robustness while fine-tuned as dense retrievers. However, their large parameter size brings significant inference time computational challenges, including high encoding costs for large-scale corpora and increased query latency, limiting their practical deployment. While smaller retrievers offer better efficiency, they often fail to generalize effectively with limited supervised fine-tuning data. In this work, we introduce DRAMA, a training framework that leverages LLMs to train smaller generalizable dense retrievers. In particular, we adopt pruned LLMs as the backbone and train on diverse LLM-augmented data in a single-stage contrastive learning setup. Experiments show that DRAMA offers better multilingual and long-context capabilities than traditional encoder-based retrievers, and achieves strong performance across multiple tasks and languages. These highlight the potential of connecting the training of smaller retrievers with the growing advancements in LLMs, bridging the gap between efficiency and generalization.

In-context machine translation (MT) with large language models (LLMs) is a promising approach for low-resource MT, as it can readily take advantage of linguistic resources such as grammar books and dictionaries. Such resources are usually selectively integrated into the prompt so that LLMs can directly perform translation without any specific training, via their in-context learning capability (ICL). However, the relative importance of each type of resource e.g., dictionary, grammar book, and retrieved parallel examples, is not entirely clear. To address this gap, this study systematically investigates how each resource and its quality affects the translation performance, with the Manchu language as our case study. To remove any prior knowledge of Manchu encoded in the LLM parameters and single out the effect of ICL, we also experiment with an encrypted version of Manchu texts. Our results indicate that high-quality dictionaries and good parallel examples are very helpful, while grammars hardly help. In a follow-up study, we showcase a promising application of in-context MT: parallel data augmentation as a way to bootstrap the conventional MT model. When monolingual data abound, generating synthetic parallel data through in-context MT offers a pathway to mitigate data scarcity and build effective and efficient low-resource neural MT systems.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced the field of automated code generation. LLMs rely on large and diverse datasets to learn syntax, semantics, and usage patterns of programming languages. For low-resource languages (i.e., niche programming languages characterized by the scarcity of training data), the limited availability of such data hampers the models' ability to generalize effectively, resulting in poorer code generation performance as compared to high-resource languages. For this reason, there is a quest for techniques able to close this performance gap. We present an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of several approaches for boosting LLMs' performance on low-resource languages, namely: (i) a classic fine-tuning, which is however capped in size by the scarcity of training data; (ii) three variants of in-context learning, with prompts crafted to provide the LLM with additional information about the low-resource language (e.g., few-shot examples showcasing features of the targeted language); and (iii) a pre-training objective teaching the model how to translate between high- and low-resource languages. The context of our study are two low-resource languages (R and Racket) and six LLMs having different architectures and sizes. Our findings reveal that a fine-tuning is usually the best choice for smaller LLMs, possibly due to the fact that even a small dataset is sufficient to train their limited number of parameters. With the increase in size of the models, in-context learning becomes more and more effective, representing a safe and cheap bet (i.e., it always helps, but with different magnitudes). Differently, very large LLMs may deteriorate their performance on low-resource languages when fine-tuning is performed, possibly due to the lack of enough data needed to effectively update their weights.

General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable advancements in machine translation (MT) by leveraging extensive web content. On the other hand, translation-specific LLMs are built by pre-training on domain-specific monolingual corpora and fine-tuning with human-annotated translation data. Despite the superior performance, these methods either demand an unprecedented scale of computing and data or substantial human editing and annotation efforts. In this paper, we develop MT-Ladder, a novel model-agnostic and cost-effective tool to refine the performance of general LLMs for MT. MT-Ladder is trained on pseudo-refinement triplets which can be easily obtained from existing LLMs without additional human cost. During training, we propose a hierarchical fine-tuning strategy with an easy-to-hard schema, improving MT-Ladder's refining performance progressively. The trained MT-Ladder can be seamlessly integrated with any general-purpose LLMs to boost their translation performance. By utilizing Gemma-2B/7B as the backbone, MT-Ladder-2B can elevate raw translations to the level of top-tier open-source models (e.g., refining BigTranslate-13B with +6.91 BLEU and +3.52 COMET for XX-En), and MT-Ladder-7B can further enhance model performance to be on par with the state-of-the-art GPT-4. Extensive ablation and analysis corroborate the effectiveness of MT-Ladder in diverse settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/fzp0424/Ladder

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.

Word embeddings and pre-trained language models allow to build rich representations of text and have enabled improvements across most NLP tasks. Unfortunately they are very expensive to train, and many small companies and research groups tend to use models that have been pre-trained and made available by third parties, rather than building their own. This is suboptimal as, for many languages, the models have been trained on smaller (or lower quality) corpora. In addition, monolingual pre-trained models for non-English languages are not always available. At best, models for those languages are included in multilingual versions, where each language shares the quota of substrings and parameters with the rest of the languages. This is particularly true for smaller languages such as Basque. In this paper we show that a number of monolingual models (FastText word embeddings, FLAIR and BERT language models) trained with larger Basque corpora produce much better results than publicly available versions in downstream NLP tasks, including topic classification, sentiment classification, PoS tagging and NER. This work sets a new state-of-the-art in those tasks for Basque. All benchmarks and models used in this work are publicly available.

Multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) acquire valuable, generalizable linguistic information during pretraining and have advanced the state of the art on task-specific finetuning. To date, only ~31 out of ~2,000 African languages are covered in existing language models. We ameliorate this limitation by developing SERENGETI, a massively multilingual language model that covers 517 African languages and language varieties. We evaluate our novel models on eight natural language understanding tasks across 20 datasets, comparing to 4 mPLMs that cover 4-23 African languages. SERENGETI outperforms other models on 11 datasets across the eights tasks, achieving 82.27 average F_1. We also perform analyses of errors from our models, which allows us to investigate the influence of language genealogy and linguistic similarity when the models are applied under zero-shot settings. We will publicly release our models for research.\href{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/serengeti{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/serengeti}}

Detoxifying multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) has become crucial due to their increasing global use. In this work, we explore zero-shot cross-lingual generalization of preference tuning in detoxifying LLMs. Unlike previous studies that show limited cross-lingual generalization for other safety tasks, we demonstrate that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) training with only English data can significantly reduce toxicity in multilingual open-ended generations. For example, the probability of mGPT-1.3B generating toxic continuations drops from 46.8% to 3.9% across 17 different languages after training. Our results also extend to other multilingual LLMs, such as BLOOM, Llama3, and Aya-23. Using mechanistic interpretability tools like causal intervention and activation analysis, we identified the dual multilinguality property of MLP layers in LLMs, which explains the cross-lingual generalization of DPO. Finally, we show that bilingual sentence retrieval can predict the cross-lingual transferability of DPO preference tuning.

The fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is pivotal for achieving optimal performance across diverse downstream tasks. However, while full fine-tuning delivers superior results, it entails significant computational and resource costs. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, address these challenges by reducing the number of trainable parameters, but they often struggle with rank adjustment efficiency and task-specific adaptability. We propose Triangular Adaptive Low-Rank Adaptation (TriAdaptLoRA), a novel PEFT framework inspired by neuroscience principles, which dynamically optimizes the allocation of trainable parameters. TriAdaptLoRA introduces three key innovations: 1) a triangular split of transformation matrices into lower and upper triangular components to maximize parameter utilization, 2) a parameter importance metric based on normalized Frobenius norms for efficient adaptation, and 3) an adaptive rank-growth strategy governed by dynamic thresholds, allowing flexible parameter allocation across training steps. Experiments conducted on a variety of natural language understanding and generation tasks demonstrate that TriAdaptLoRA consistently outperforms existing PEFT methods. It achieves superior performance, enhanced stability, and reduced computational overhead, particularly under linear threshold-driven rank growth. These results highlight its efficacy as a scalable and resource-efficient solution for fine-tuning LLMs.

With the ever-growing size of pretrained models (PMs), fine-tuning them has become more expensive and resource-hungry. As a remedy, low-rank adapters (LoRA) keep the main pretrained weights of the model frozen and just introduce some learnable truncated SVD modules (so-called LoRA blocks) to the model. While LoRA blocks are parameter-efficient, they suffer from two major problems: first, the size of these blocks is fixed and cannot be modified after training (for example, if we need to change the rank of LoRA blocks, then we need to re-train them from scratch); second, optimizing their rank requires an exhaustive search and effort. In this work, we introduce a dynamic low-rank adaptation (DyLoRA) technique to address these two problems together. Our DyLoRA method trains LoRA blocks for a range of ranks instead of a single rank by sorting the representation learned by the adapter module at different ranks during training. We evaluate our solution on different natural language understanding (GLUE benchmark) and language generation tasks (E2E, DART and WebNLG) using different pretrained models such as RoBERTa and GPT with different sizes. Our results show that we can train dynamic search-free models with DyLoRA at least 4 to 7 times (depending to the task) faster than LoRA without significantly compromising performance. Moreover, our models can perform consistently well on a much larger range of ranks compared to LoRA.

There has been a surge in the development of various Large Language Models (LLMs). However, text generation for languages other than English often faces significant challenges, including poor generation quality and the reduced computational performance due to the disproportionate representation of tokens in model's vocabulary. In this work, we address these issues and introduce Vikhr, a new state-of-the-art open-source instruction-tuned LLM designed specifically for the Russian language. Unlike previous efforts for Russian that utilize computationally inexpensive LoRA adapters on top of English-oriented models, Vikhr features an adapted tokenizer vocabulary and undergoes the continued pre-training and instruction tuning of all weights. This approach not only enhances the model's performance but also significantly improves its computational and contextual efficiency. The remarkable performance of Vikhr across various Russian-language benchmarks can also be attributed to our efforts in expanding instruction datasets and corpora for continued pre-training. Vikhr not only sets the new state of the art among open-source LLMs for Russian, but even outperforms some proprietary closed-source models on certain benchmarks. The model weights, instruction sets, and code are publicly available

Instruction tuning is essential for large language models (LLMs) to become interactive. While many instruction tuning datasets exist in English, there is a noticeable lack in other languages. Also, their effectiveness has not been well verified in non-English languages. We construct a Japanese instruction dataset by expanding and filtering existing datasets and apply the dataset to a Japanese pre-trained base model. We performed Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) tuning on both Japanese and English existing models using our instruction dataset. We evaluated these models from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. As a result, the effectiveness of Japanese instruction datasets is confirmed. The results also indicate that even with relatively small LLMs, performances in downstream tasks would be improved through instruction tuning. Our instruction dataset, tuned models, and implementation are publicly available online.

We present Generalized LoRA (GLoRA), an advanced approach for universal parameter-efficient fine-tuning tasks. Enhancing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), GLoRA employs a generalized prompt module to optimize pre-trained model weights and adjust intermediate activations, providing more flexibility and capability across diverse tasks and datasets. Moreover, GLoRA facilitates efficient parameter adaptation by employing a scalable, modular, layer-wise structure search that learns individual adapter of each layer. Originating from a unified mathematical formulation, GLoRA exhibits strong transfer learning, few-shot learning and domain generalization abilities, as it adjusts to new tasks through additional dimensions on weights and activations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GLoRA outperforms all previous methods in natural, specialized, and structured benchmarks, achieving superior accuracy with fewer parameters and computations on various datasets. Furthermore, our structural re-parameterization design ensures that GLoRA incurs no extra inference cost, rendering it a practical solution for resource-limited applications. Code is available at: https://github.com/Arnav0400/ViT-Slim/tree/master/GLoRA.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot abilities on a variety of open-ended tasks, while recent research has also explored the use of LLMs for multi-modal generation. In this study, we introduce mPLUG-Owl, a novel training paradigm that equips LLMs with multi-modal abilities through modularized learning of foundation LLM, a visual knowledge module, and a visual abstractor module. This approach can support multiple modalities and facilitate diverse unimodal and multimodal abilities through modality collaboration. The training paradigm of mPLUG-Owl involves a two-stage method for aligning image and text, which learns visual knowledge with the assistance of LLM while maintaining and even improving the generation abilities of LLM. In the first stage, the visual knowledge module and abstractor module are trained with a frozen LLM module to align the image and text. In the second stage, language-only and multi-modal supervised datasets are used to jointly fine-tune a low-rank adaption (LoRA) module on LLM and the abstractor module by freezing the visual knowledge module. We carefully build a visually-related instruction evaluation set OwlEval. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing multi-modal models, demonstrating mPLUG-Owl's impressive instruction and visual understanding ability, multi-turn conversation ability, and knowledge reasoning ability. Besides, we observe some unexpected and exciting abilities such as multi-image correlation and scene text understanding, which makes it possible to leverage it for harder real scenarios, such as vision-only document comprehension. Our code, pre-trained model, instruction-tuned models, and evaluation set are available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-Owl. The online demo is available at https://www.modelscope.cn/studios/damo/mPLUG-Owl.

The growing number of parameter-efficient adaptations of a base large language model (LLM) calls for studying whether we can reuse such trained adapters to improve performance for new tasks. We study how to best build a library of adapters given multi-task data and devise techniques for both zero-shot and supervised task generalization through routing in such library. We benchmark existing approaches to build this library and introduce model-based clustering, MBC, a method that groups tasks based on the similarity of their adapter parameters, indirectly optimizing for transfer across the multi-task dataset. To re-use the library, we present a novel zero-shot routing mechanism, Arrow, which enables dynamic selection of the most relevant adapters for new inputs without the need for retraining. We experiment with several LLMs, such as Phi-2 and Mistral, on a wide array of held-out tasks, verifying that MBC-based adapters and Arrow routing lead to superior generalization to new tasks. We make steps towards creating modular, adaptable LLMs that can match or outperform traditional joint training.

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.

This study introduces a novel approach for generating high-quality, language-specific chat corpora using a self-chat mechanism. We combine a generator LLM for creating new samples and an embedder LLM to ensure diversity. A new Masked Language Modelling (MLM) model-based quality assessment metric is proposed for evaluating and filtering the corpora. Utilizing the llama2-70b as the generator and a multilingual sentence transformer as embedder, we generate an Italian chat corpus and refine the Fauno corpus, which is based on translated English ChatGPT self-chat data. The refinement uses structural assertions and Natural Language Processing techniques. Both corpora undergo a comprehensive quality evaluation using the proposed MLM model-based quality metric. The Italian LLM fine-tuned with these corpora demonstrates significantly enhanced language comprehension and question-answering skills. The resultant model, cerbero-7b, establishes a new state-of-the-art for Italian LLMs. This approach marks a substantial advancement in the development of language-specific LLMs, with a special emphasis on augmenting corpora for underrepresented languages like Italian.

Fine-tuning is a key approach for adapting language models to specific downstream tasks, but updating all model parameters becomes impractical as model sizes increase. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), address this challenge by introducing additional adaptation parameters into pre-trained weight matrices. However, LoRA's performance varies across different insertion points within the model, highlighting potential parameter inefficiency due to unnecessary insertions. To this end, we propose SSMLoRA (State Space Model Low-Rank Adaptation), an extension of LoRA that incorporates a State Space Model (SSM) to interconnect low-rank matrices. SSMLoRA ensures that performance is maintained even with sparser insertions. SSMLoRA allows the model to not only map inputs to a low-rank space for better feature extraction but also leverage the computations from the previous low-rank space. Our method achieves comparable performance to LoRA on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark while using only half the parameters. Additionally, due to its structure, SSMLoRA shows promise in handling tasks with longer input sequences. .You can find our code here:https://github.com/yuhkalhic/SSMLoRA.

Pre-trained multilingual language models underpin a large portion of modern NLP tools outside of English. A strong baseline for specializing these models for specific languages is Language-Adaptive Pre-Training (LAPT). However, retaining a large cross-lingual vocabulary and embedding matrix comes at considerable excess computational cost during adaptation. In this study, we propose several simple techniques to replace a cross-lingual vocabulary with a compact, language-specific one. Namely, we address strategies for re-initializing the token embedding matrix after vocabulary specialization. We then provide a systematic experimental comparison of our techniques, in addition to the recently-proposed Focus method. We demonstrate that: 1) Embedding-replacement techniques in the monolingual transfer literature are inadequate for adapting multilingual models. 2) Replacing cross-lingual vocabularies with smaller specialized ones provides an efficient method to improve performance in low-resource languages. 3) Simple embedding re-initialization techniques based on script-wise sub-distributions rival techniques such as Focus, which rely on similarity scores obtained from an auxiliary model.

Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, PaLM, and LLaMa, have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks. Recent advancements in instruction tuning bring LLMs with ability in following user's instructions and producing human-like responses. However, the high costs associated with training and implementing LLMs pose challenges to academic research. Furthermore, the availability of pretrained LLMs and instruction-tune datasets for Vietnamese language is limited. To tackle these concerns, we leverage large-scale instruction-following datasets from open-source projects, namely Alpaca, GPT4All, and Chat-Doctor, which cover general domain and specific medical domain. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first instructional dataset for Vietnamese. Subsequently, we utilize parameter-efficient tuning through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on two open LLMs: Bloomz (Multilingual) and GPTJ-6B (Vietnamese), resulting four models: Bloomz-Chat, Bloomz-Doctor, GPTJ-Chat, GPTJ-Doctor.Finally, we assess the effectiveness of our methodology on a per-sample basis, taking into consideration the helpfulness, relevance, accuracy, level of detail in their responses. This evaluation process entails the utilization of GPT-4 as an automated scoring mechanism. Despite utilizing a low-cost setup, our method demonstrates about 20-30\% improvement over the original models in our evaluation tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant multilingual capabilities. However, the mechanisms underlying the development of these capabilities during pre-training are not well understood. In this paper, we use code LLMs as an experimental platform to explore the evolution of multilingual capabilities in LLMs during the pre-training process. Based on our observations, we propose the Babel Tower Hypothesis, which describes the entire process of LLMs acquiring new language capabilities. During the learning process, multiple languages initially share a single knowledge system dominated by the primary language and gradually develop language-specific knowledge systems. We then validate the above hypothesis by tracking the internal states of the LLMs through identifying working languages and language transferring neurons. Experimental results show that the internal state changes of the LLM are consistent with our Babel Tower Hypothesis. Building on these insights, we propose a novel method to construct an optimized pre-training corpus for multilingual code LLMs, which significantly outperforms LLMs trained on the original corpus. The proposed Babel Tower Hypothesis provides new insights into designing pre-training data distributions to achieve optimal multilingual capabilities in LLMs.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is essential for adapting large language models (LLMs), with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) being the most popular approach. However, LoRA suffers from slow convergence, and some recent LoRA variants, such as PiSSA, primarily rely on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for initialization, leading to expensive computation. To mitigate these problems, we use the Nystr\"om method, which follows a three-matrix manipulation. We first introduce StructuredLoRA (SLoRA), which investigates adding a small intermediate matrix between the low-rank matrices A and B. Secondly, we propose Nystr\"omLoRA (NLoRA), which leverages Nystr\"om-based initialization for SLoRA to improve its effectiveness and efficiency. Finally, we propose IntermediateTune (IntTune), which explores fine-tuning exclusively on the intermediate matrix of NLoRA to further boost LLM efficiency. We evaluate our methods on five natural language generation (NLG) tasks and eight natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. On GSM8K, SLoRA and NLoRA achieve accuracies of 56.48% and 57.70%, surpassing LoRA by 33.52% and 36.41%, with only 3.67 million additional trainable parameters. IntTune improves average NLG performance over LoRA by 7.45% while using only 1.25% of its parameters. These results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach in enhancing model performance with minimal parameter overhead.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, enabling unprecedented capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text. However, the computational cost and convergence times associated with fine-tuning these models remain significant challenges. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a promising method to mitigate these issues by introducing efficient fine-tuning techniques with a reduced number of trainable parameters. In this paper, we present OLoRA, an enhancement to the LoRA method that leverages orthonormal matrix initialization through QR decomposition. OLoRA significantly accelerates the convergence of LLM training while preserving the efficiency benefits of LoRA, such as the number of trainable parameters and GPU memory footprint. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that OLoRA not only converges faster but also exhibits improved performance compared to standard LoRA across a variety of language modeling tasks. This advancement opens new avenues for more efficient and accessible fine-tuning of LLMs, potentially enabling broader adoption and innovation in natural language applications.

Fine-tuning is a crucial process for adapting large language models (LLMs) to diverse applications. In certain scenarios, such as multi-tenant serving, deploying multiple LLMs becomes necessary to meet complex demands. Recent studies suggest decomposing a fine-tuned LLM into a base model and corresponding delta weights, which are then compressed using low-rank or low-bit approaches to reduce costs. In this work, we observe that existing low-rank and low-bit compression methods can significantly harm the model performance for task-specific fine-tuned LLMs (e.g., WizardMath for math problems). Motivated by the long-tail distribution of singular values in the delta weights, we propose a delta quantization approach using mixed-precision. This method employs higher-bit representation for singular vectors corresponding to larger singular values. We evaluate our approach on various fine-tuned LLMs, including math LLMs, code LLMs, chat LLMs, and even VLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach performs comparably to full fine-tuned LLMs, surpassing both low-rank and low-bit baselines by a considerable margin. Additionally, we show that our method is compatible with various backbone LLMs, such as Llama-2, Llama-3, and Mistral, highlighting its generalizability.

Multilingual language models have recently gained attention as a promising solution for representing multiple languages in a single model. In this paper, we propose new criteria to evaluate the quality of lexical representation and vocabulary overlap observed in sub-word tokenizers. Our findings show that the overlap of vocabulary across languages can be actually detrimental to certain downstream tasks (POS, dependency tree labeling). In contrast, NER and sentence-level tasks (cross-lingual retrieval, NLI) benefit from sharing vocabulary. We also observe that the coverage of the language-specific tokens in the multilingual vocabulary significantly impacts the word-level tasks. Our study offers a deeper understanding of the role of tokenizers in multilingual language models and guidelines for future model developers to choose the most suitable tokenizer for their specific application before undertaking costly model pre-training

In information retrieval, proprietary large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and open-source counterparts such as LLaMA and Vicuna have played a vital role in reranking. However, the gap between open-source and closed models persists, with reliance on proprietary, non-transparent models constraining reproducibility. Addressing this gap, we introduce RankZephyr, a state-of-the-art, open-source LLM for listwise zero-shot reranking. RankZephyr not only bridges the effectiveness gap with GPT-4 but in some cases surpasses the proprietary model. Our comprehensive evaluations across several datasets (TREC Deep Learning Tracks; NEWS and COVID from BEIR) showcase this ability. RankZephyr benefits from strategic training choices and is resilient against variations in initial document ordering and the number of documents reranked. Additionally, our model outperforms GPT-4 on the NovelEval test set, comprising queries and passages past its training period, which addresses concerns about data contamination. To foster further research in this rapidly evolving field, we provide all code necessary to reproduce our results at https://github.com/castorini/rank_llm.

Foundational large language models (LLMs) can be instruction-tuned to develop open-ended question-answering capability, facilitating applications such as the creation of AI assistants. While such efforts are often carried out in a single language, building on prior research, we empirically analyze cost-efficient approaches of monolingual and multilingual tuning, shedding light on the efficacy of LLMs in responding to queries across monolingual and multilingual contexts. Our study employs the Alpaca dataset and machine translations of it to form multilingual training data, which is then used to tune LLMs through low-rank adaptation and full-parameter training. Comparisons reveal that multilingual tuning is not crucial for an LLM's English performance, but is key to its robustness in a multilingual environment. With a fixed budget, a multilingual instruction-tuned model, merely trained on downsampled data, can be as powerful as training monolingual models for each language. Our findings serve as a guide for expanding language support through instruction tuning with constrained computational resources.

By leveraging the retrieval of information from external knowledge databases, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced capabilities for accomplishing many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, due to the inherent flaws of current retrieval systems, there might exist irrelevant information within those retrieving top-ranked passages. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation into the robustness of LLMs to different types of irrelevant information under various conditions. We initially introduce a framework to construct high-quality irrelevant information that ranges from semantically unrelated, partially related, and related to questions. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the constructed irrelevant information not only scores highly on similarity metrics, being highly retrieved by existing systems, but also bears semantic connections to the context. Our investigation reveals that current LLMs still face challenges in discriminating highly semantically related information and can be easily distracted by these irrelevant yet misleading contents. Besides, we also find that current solutions for handling irrelevant information have limitations in improving the robustness of LLMs to such distractions. Resources are available at https://github.com/Di-viner/LLM-Robustness-to-Irrelevant-Information.

As the size of Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMs) increases consistently, the adaptation of these pre-trained models to specialized tasks has become a computationally and memory-intensive challenge. Traditional fine-tuning methods require isolated, exhaustive retuning for each new task, limiting the models' versatility. Moreover, current efficient adaptation techniques often overlook modality alignment, focusing only on the knowledge extraction of new tasks. To tackle these issues, we introduce Multiway-Adapter, an innovative framework incorporating an 'Alignment Enhancer' to deepen modality alignment, enabling high transferability without tuning pre-trained parameters. Our method adds fewer than 1.25\% of additional parameters to LMMs, exemplified by the BEiT-3 model in our study. This leads to superior zero-shot image-text retrieval performance compared to fully fine-tuned models, while achieving up to a 57\% reduction in fine-tuning time. Our approach offers a resource-efficient and effective adaptation pathway for LMMs, broadening their applicability. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/longkukuhi/MultiWay-Adapter.

Multilingual language models have significantly advanced due to rapid progress in natural language processing. Models like BLOOM 1.7B, trained on diverse multilingual datasets, aim to bridge linguistic gaps. However, their effectiveness in capturing linguistic knowledge, particularly for low-resource languages, remains an open question. This study critically examines MLMs capabilities in multilingual understanding, semantic representation, and cross-lingual knowledge transfer. While these models perform well for high-resource languages, they struggle with less-represented ones. Additionally, traditional evaluation methods often overlook their internal syntactic and semantic encoding. This research addresses key limitations through three objectives. First, it assesses semantic similarity by analyzing multilingual word embeddings for consistency using cosine similarity. Second, it examines BLOOM-1.7B and Qwen2 through Named Entity Recognition and sentence similarity tasks to understand their linguistic structures. Third, it explores cross-lingual knowledge transfer by evaluating generalization from high-resource to low-resource languages in sentiment analysis and text classification. By leveraging linguistic probing, performance metrics, and visualizations, this study provides insights into the strengths and limitations of MLMs. The findings aim to enhance multilingual NLP models, ensuring better support for both high- and low-resource languages, thereby promoting inclusivity in language technologies.

Pre-trained language models, trained on large-scale corpora, demonstrate strong generalizability across various NLP tasks. Fine-tuning these models for specific tasks typically involves updating all parameters, which is resource-intensive. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as the popular LoRA family, introduce low-rank matrices to learn only a few parameters efficiently. However, during inference, the product of these matrices updates all pre-trained parameters, complicating tasks like knowledge editing that require selective updates. We propose a novel PEFT method, which conducts row and column-wise sparse low-rank adaptation (RoseLoRA), to address this challenge. RoseLoRA identifies and updates only the most important parameters for a specific task, maintaining efficiency while preserving other model knowledge. By adding a sparsity constraint on the product of low-rank matrices and converting it to row and column-wise sparsity, we ensure efficient and precise model updates. Our theoretical analysis guarantees the lower bound of the sparsity with respective to the matrix product. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks across twenty datasets demonstrate that RoseLoRA outperforms baselines in both general fine-tuning and knowledge editing tasks.

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.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) based embedding models have established new state-of-the-art benchmarks for text embedding tasks, particularly in dense vector-based retrieval. However, these models predominantly focus on English, leaving multilingual embedding capabilities largely unexplored. To address this limitation, we present LUSIFER, a novel zero-shot approach that adapts LLM-based embedding models for multilingual tasks without requiring multilingual supervision. LUSIFER's architecture combines a multilingual encoder, serving as a language-universal learner, with an LLM-based embedding model optimized for embedding-specific tasks. These components are seamlessly integrated through a minimal set of trainable parameters that act as a connector, effectively transferring the multilingual encoder's language understanding capabilities to the specialized embedding model. Additionally, to comprehensively evaluate multilingual embedding performance, we introduce a new benchmark encompassing 5 primary embedding tasks, 123 diverse datasets, and coverage across 14 languages. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LUSIFER significantly enhances the multilingual performance across various embedding tasks, particularly for medium and low-resource languages, without requiring explicit multilingual training data.

Massively multilingual sentence representations are trained on large corpora of uncurated data, with a very imbalanced proportion of languages included in the training. This may cause the models to grasp cultural values including moral judgments from the high-resource languages and impose them on the low-resource languages. The lack of data in certain languages can also lead to developing random and thus potentially harmful beliefs. Both these issues can negatively influence zero-shot cross-lingual model transfer and potentially lead to harmful outcomes. Therefore, we aim to (1) detect and quantify these issues by comparing different models in different languages, (2) develop methods for improving undesirable properties of the models. Our initial experiments using the multilingual model XLM-R show that indeed multilingual LMs capture moral norms, even with potentially higher human-agreement than monolingual ones. However, it is not yet clear to what extent these moral norms differ between languages.

Low-resource languages, by its very definition, tend to be under represented in the pre-training corpora of Large Language Models. In this work, we investigate three low-resource cross-lingual approaches that enable an LLM adapt to tasks in previously unseen languages. Llama-2 is an LLM where Indic languages, among many other language families, contribute to less than 0.005% of the total 2 trillion token pre-training corpora. In this work, we experiment with the English-dominated Llama-2 for cross-lingual transfer to three Indic languages, Bengali, Hindi, and Tamil as target languages. We study three approaches for cross-lingual transfer, under ICL and fine-tuning. One, we find that adding additional supervisory signals via a dominant language in the LLM, leads to improvements, both under in-context learning and fine-tuning. Two, adapting the target languages to word reordering may be beneficial under ICL, but its impact diminishes with fine tuning. Finally, continued pre-training in one low-resource language can improve model performance for other related low-resource languages.

Low-resource languages face significant challenges due to the lack of sufficient linguistic data, resources, and tools for tasks such as supervised learning, annotation, and classification. This shortage hinders the development of accurate models and datasets, making it difficult to perform critical NLP tasks like sentiment analysis or hate speech detection. To bridge this gap, Large Language Models (LLMs) present an opportunity for potential annotators, capable of generating datasets and resources for these underrepresented languages. In this paper, we focus on Marathi, a low-resource language, and evaluate the performance of both closed-source and open-source LLMs as annotators. We assess models such as GPT-4o and Gemini 1.0 Pro, Gemma 2 (2B and 9B), and Llama 3.1 (8B) on classification tasks including sentiment analysis, news classification, and hate speech detection. Our findings reveal that while LLMs excel in annotation tasks for high-resource languages like English, they still fall short when applied to Marathi. Even advanced closed models like Gemini and GPT underperform in comparison to BERT-based baselines, highlighting the limitations of LLMs as annotators for low-resource languages.

Low-rank training has emerged as a promising approach for reducing memory usage in training Large Language Models (LLMs). Previous methods either rely on decomposing weight matrices (e.g., LoRA), or seek to decompose gradient matrices (e.g., GaLore) to ensure reduced memory consumption. However, both of them constrain the training in a low-rank subspace, thus inevitably leading to sub-optimal performance. This raises a question: whether it is possible to consistently preserve the low-rank constraint for memory efficiency, while achieving full-rank training (i.e., training with full-rank gradients of full-rank weights) to avoid inferior outcomes? In this paper, we propose a new plug-and-play training framework for LLMs called Fira, as the first attempt to achieve this goal. First, we observe an interesting phenomenon during LLM training: the scaling impact of adaptive optimizers (e.g., Adam) on the gradient norm remains similar from low-rank to full-rank training. Based on this observation, we propose a norm-based scaling method, which utilizes the scaling impact of low-rank optimizers as substitutes for that of original full-rank optimizers to enable full-rank training. In this way, we can preserve the low-rank constraint in the optimizer while achieving full-rank training for better performance. Moreover, we find that there are sudden gradient rises during the optimization process, potentially causing loss spikes. To address this, we further put forward a norm-growth limiter to smooth the gradient via regulating the relative increase of gradient norms. Extensive experiments on the pre-training and fine-tuning of LLMs show that Fira outperforms both LoRA and GaLore, achieving performance that is comparable to or even better than full-rank training.

As retrieval-augmented generation prevails in large language models, embedding models are becoming increasingly crucial. Despite the growing number of general embedding models, prior work often overlooks the critical role of training data quality. In this work, we introduce KaLM-Embedding, a general multilingual embedding model that leverages a large quantity of cleaner, more diverse, and domain-specific training data. Our model has been trained with key techniques proven to enhance performance: (1) persona-based synthetic data to create diversified examples distilled from LLMs, (2) ranking consistency filtering to remove less informative samples, and (3) semi-homogeneous task batch sampling to improve training efficacy. Departing from traditional BERT-like architectures, we adopt Qwen2-0.5B as the pre-trained model, facilitating the adaptation of auto-regressive language models for general embedding tasks. Extensive evaluations of the MTEB benchmark across multiple languages show that our model outperforms others of comparable size, setting a new standard for multilingual embedding models with <1B parameters.

The impressive development of large language models (LLMs) is expanding into the realm of large multimodal models (LMMs), which incorporate multiple types of data beyond text. However, the nature of multimodal models leads to significant expenses in the creation of training data. Furthermore, constructing multilingual data for LMMs presents its own set of challenges due to language diversity and complexity. Therefore, in this study, we propose two cost-effective methods to solve this problem: (1) vocabulary expansion and pretraining of multilingual LLM for specific languages, and (2) automatic and elaborate construction of multimodal datasets using GPT4-V. Based on015 these methods, we constructed a 91K English-Korean-Chinese multilingual, multimodal training dataset. Additionally, we developed a bilingual multimodal model that exhibits excellent performance in both Korean and English, surpassing existing approaches.

The NLP community has mainly focused on scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) vertically, i.e., making them better for about 100 languages. We instead scale LLMs horizontally: we create, through continued pretraining, Glot500-m, an LLM that covers 511 languages, almost all of them low-resource. An important part of this effort is to collect and clean Glot500-c, a corpus that covers these 511 languages and allows us to train Glot500-m. We evaluate Glot500-m on five diverse tasks across these languages. We observe large improvements for both high-resource and lowresource languages compared to an XLM-R baseline. Our analysis shows that no single factor explains the quality of multilingual LLM representations. Rather, a combination of factors determines quality including corpus size, script, "help" from related languages and the total capacity of the model. Our work addresses an important goal of NLP research: we should not limit NLP to a small fraction of the world's languages and instead strive to support as many languages as possible to bring the benefits of NLP technology to all languages and cultures. Code, data and models are available at https://github.com/cisnlp/Glot500.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for knowledge-intensive tasks and contexts. Existing approaches improve the knowledge capabilities of general-purpose LLMs through retrieval or generated knowledge prompting, but they fall short of reflecting two key properties of knowledge-rich models: knowledge should be modular, ever-growing, sourced from diverse domains; knowledge acquisition and production should be a collaborative process, where diverse stakeholders contribute new information. To this end, we propose CooK, a novel framework to empower general-purpose large language models with modular and collaboratively sourced knowledge. We first introduce specialized language models, autoregressive models trained on corpora from a wide range of domains and sources. These specialized LMs serve as parametric knowledge repositories that are later prompted to generate background knowledge for general-purpose LLMs. We then propose three knowledge filters to dynamically select and retain information in generated documents by controlling for relevance, brevity, and factuality. Finally, we propose bottom-up and top-down knowledge integration approaches to augment general-purpose LLMs with the curated (relevant, factual) knowledge from community-driven specialized LMs that enable multi-domain knowledge synthesis and on-demand knowledge requests. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that CooK achieves state-of-the-art performance on six benchmark datasets. Our results highlight the potential of enriching general-purpose LLMs with evolving and modular knowledge -- relevant knowledge that can be continuously updated through the collective efforts of the research community.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with high parameter efficiency for downstream tasks has become a new paradigm. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters for fine-tuning. Although it has demonstrated commendable performance, updating parameters within a single scale may not be the optimal choice for complex downstream tasks.In this paper, we extend the LoRA to multiple scales, dubbed as LoRA^2. We first combine orthogonal projection theory to train a set of LoRAs in two mutually orthogonal planes. Then, we improve the importance score algorithm, which reduce parameter sensitivity score calculations by approximately 98.5\%. By pruning singular values with lower importance scores, thereby enhancing adaptability to various downstream tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted on two widely used pre-trained models to validate the effectiveness of LoRA^2. Results show that it significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters to just 0.72\% compared to full fine-tuning, while still delivering highly impressive performance. Even when the parameters are further reduced to 0.17M, it still achieves comparable results to the baseline with 8 times more parameters. Our code is available here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LoRA-2-5B4C

Multi-lingual language models (LM), such as mBERT, XLM-R, mT5, mBART, have been remarkably successful in enabling natural language tasks in low-resource languages through cross-lingual transfer from high-resource ones. In this work, we try to better understand how such models, specifically mT5, transfer *any* linguistic and semantic knowledge across languages, even though no explicit cross-lingual signals are provided during pre-training. Rather, only unannotated texts from each language are presented to the model separately and independently of one another, and the model appears to implicitly learn cross-lingual connections. This raises several questions that motivate our study, such as: Are the cross-lingual connections between every language pair equally strong? What properties of source and target language impact the strength of cross-lingual transfer? Can we quantify the impact of those properties on the cross-lingual transfer? In our investigation, we analyze a pre-trained mT5 to discover the attributes of cross-lingual connections learned by the model. Through a statistical interpretation framework over 90 language pairs across three tasks, we show that transfer performance can be modeled by a few linguistic and data-derived features. These observations enable us to interpret cross-lingual understanding of the mT5 model. Through these observations, one can favorably choose the best source language for a task, and can anticipate its training data demands. A key finding of this work is that similarity of syntax, morphology and phonology are good predictors of cross-lingual transfer, significantly more than just the lexical similarity of languages. For a given language, we are able to predict zero-shot performance, that increases on a logarithmic scale with the number of few-shot target language data points.

Self-Supervised Learning is vastly used to efficiently represent speech for Spoken Language Understanding, gradually replacing conventional approaches. Meanwhile, textual SSL models are proposed to encode language-agnostic semantics. SAMU-XLSR framework employed this semantic information to enrich multilingual speech representations. A recent study investigated SAMU-XLSR in-domain semantic enrichment by specializing it on downstream transcriptions, leading to state-of-the-art results on a challenging SLU task. This study's interest lies in the loss of multilingual performances and lack of specific-semantics training induced by such specialization in close languages without any SLU implication. We also consider SAMU-XLSR's loss of initial cross-lingual abilities due to a separate SLU fine-tuning. Therefore, this paper proposes a dual task learning approach to improve SAMU-XLSR semantic enrichment while considering distant languages for multilingual and language portability experiments.

This paper aims to efficiently enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to use multimodal tools. Advanced proprietary LLMs, such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, have shown great potential for tool usage through sophisticated prompt engineering. Nevertheless, these models typically rely on prohibitive computational costs and publicly inaccessible data. To address these challenges, we propose the GPT4Tools based on self-instruct to enable open-source LLMs, such as LLaMA and OPT, to use tools. It generates an instruction-following dataset by prompting an advanced teacher with various multi-modal contexts. By using the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) optimization, our approach facilitates the open-source LLMs to solve a range of visual problems, including visual comprehension and image generation. Moreover, we provide a benchmark to evaluate the ability of LLMs to use tools, which is performed in both zero-shot and fine-tuning ways. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various language models, which not only significantly improves the accuracy of invoking seen tools, but also enables the zero-shot capacity for unseen tools. The code and demo are available at https://github.com/StevenGrove/GPT4Tools.

Recently, significant public efforts have been directed towards developing low-cost models with capabilities akin to ChatGPT, thereby fostering the growth of open-source conversational models. However, there remains a scarcity of comprehensive and in-depth evaluations of these models' performance. In this study, we examine the influence of training data factors, including quantity, quality, and linguistic distribution, on model performance. Our analysis is grounded in several publicly accessible, high-quality instruction datasets, as well as our own Chinese multi-turn conversations. We assess various models using a evaluation set of 1,000 samples, encompassing nine real-world scenarios. Our goal is to supplement manual evaluations with quantitative analyses, offering valuable insights for the continued advancement of open-source chat models. Furthermore, to enhance the performance and training and inference efficiency of models in the Chinese domain, we extend the vocabulary of LLaMA - the model with the closest open-source performance to proprietary language models like GPT-3 - and conduct secondary pre-training on 3.4B Chinese words. We make our model, data, as well as code publicly available.

Vision-and-language (VL) models with separate encoders for each modality (e.g., CLIP) have become the go-to models for zero-shot image classification and image-text retrieval. The bulk of the evaluation of these models is, however, performed with English text only: the costly creation of language-specific image-caption datasets has limited multilingual VL benchmarks to a handful of high-resource languages. In this work, we introduce Babel-ImageNet, a massively multilingual benchmark that offers (partial) translations of 1000 ImageNet labels to 92 languages, built without resorting to machine translation (MT) or requiring manual annotation. We instead automatically obtain reliable translations of ImageNext concepts by linking them -- via shared WordNet synsets -- to BabelNet, a massively multilingual lexico-semantic network. We evaluate 8 different publicly available multilingual CLIP models on zero-shot image classification (ZS-IC) for each of the 92 Babel-ImageNet languages, demonstrating a significant gap between English ImageNet performance and that of high-resource languages (e.g., German or Chinese), and an even bigger gap for low-resource languages (e.g., Sinhala or Lao). Crucially, we show that the models' ZS-IC performance on Babel-ImageNet highly correlates with their performance in image-text retrieval, validating that Babel-ImageNet is suitable for estimating the quality of the multilingual VL representation spaces for the vast majority of languages that lack gold image-text data. Finally, we show that the performance of multilingual CLIP for low-resource languages can be drastically improved via cheap, parameter-efficient language-specific training. We make our code and data publicly available: https://github.com/gregor-ge/Babel-ImageNet

The MS MARCO ranking dataset has been widely used for training deep learning models for IR tasks, achieving considerable effectiveness on diverse zero-shot scenarios. However, this type of resource is scarce in languages other than English. In this work, we present mMARCO, a multilingual version of the MS MARCO passage ranking dataset comprising 13 languages that was created using machine translation. We evaluated mMARCO by finetuning monolingual and multilingual reranking models, as well as a multilingual dense retrieval model on this dataset. We also evaluated models finetuned using the mMARCO dataset in a zero-shot scenario on Mr. TyDi dataset, demonstrating that multilingual models finetuned on our translated dataset achieve superior effectiveness to models finetuned on the original English version alone. Our experiments also show that a distilled multilingual reranker is competitive with non-distilled models while having 5.4 times fewer parameters. Lastly, we show a positive correlation between translation quality and retrieval effectiveness, providing evidence that improvements in translation methods might lead to improvements in multilingual information retrieval. The translated datasets and finetuned models are available at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/mMARCO.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on text-only data that go far beyond the languages with paired speech and text data. At the same time, Dual Encoder (DE) based retrieval systems project queries and documents into the same embedding space and have demonstrated their success in retrieval and bi-text mining. To match speech and text in many languages, we propose using LLMs to initialize multi-modal DE retrieval systems. Unlike traditional methods, our system doesn't require speech data during LLM pre-training and can exploit LLM's multilingual text understanding capabilities to match speech and text in languages unseen during retrieval training. Our multi-modal LLM-based retrieval system is capable of matching speech and text in 102 languages despite only training on 21 languages. Our system outperforms previous systems trained explicitly on all 102 languages. We achieve a 10% absolute improvement in Recall@1 averaged across these languages. Additionally, our model demonstrates cross-lingual speech and text matching, which is further enhanced by readily available machine translation data.

Prompt tuning is a promising method to fine-tune a pre-trained language model without retraining its large-scale parameters. Instead, it attaches a soft prompt to the input text, whereby downstream tasks can be well adapted by merely learning the embeddings of prompt tokens. Nevertheless, existing methods still suffer from two challenges: (i) they are hard to balance accuracy and efficiency. A longer (shorter) soft prompt generally leads to a better(worse) accuracy but at the cost of more (less) training time. (ii)The performance may not be consistent when adapting to different downstream tasks. We attribute it to the same embedding space but responsible for different requirements of downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose an Efficient Prompt Tuning method (EPT) by multi-space projection and prompt fusion. Specifically, it decomposes a given soft prompt into a shorter prompt and two low-rank matrices, significantly reducing the training time. Accuracy is also enhanced by leveraging low-rank matrices and the short prompt as additional knowledge sources to enrich the semantics of the original short prompt. In addition, we project the soft prompt into multiple subspaces to improve the performance consistency, and then adaptively learn the combination weights of different spaces through a gating network. Experiments on 13 natural language processing downstream tasks show that our method significantly and consistently outperforms 11 comparison methods with the relative percentage of improvements up to 12.9%, and training time decreased by 14%.

Pretrained language models have improved effectiveness on numerous tasks, including ad-hoc retrieval. Recent work has shown that continuing to pretrain a language model with auxiliary objectives before fine-tuning on the retrieval task can further improve retrieval effectiveness. Unlike monolingual retrieval, designing an appropriate auxiliary task for cross-language mappings is challenging. To address this challenge, we use comparable Wikipedia articles in different languages to further pretrain off-the-shelf multilingual pretrained models before fine-tuning on the retrieval task. We show that our approach yields improvements in retrieval effectiveness.

Benefiting from massive corpora and advanced hardware, large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. However, their performance degrades in scenarios where multiple tasks are encountered sequentially, also known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose orthogonal low-rank adaptation (O-LoRA), a simple and efficient approach for continual learning in language models, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting while learning new tasks. Specifically, O-LoRA learns tasks in different (low-rank) vector subspaces that are kept orthogonal to each other in order to minimize interference. Our method induces only marginal additional parameter costs and requires no user data storage for replay. Experimental results on continual learning benchmarks show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, compared to previous approaches, our method excels in preserving the generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks.

For many low-resource languages, the only available language models are large multilingual models trained on many languages simultaneously. However, using FLORES perplexity as a metric, we find that these models perform worse than bigrams for many languages (e.g. 24% of languages in XGLM 4.5B; 43% in BLOOM 7.1B). To facilitate research that focuses on low-resource languages, we pre-train and release Goldfish, a suite of monolingual autoregressive Transformer language models up to 125M parameters for 350 languages. The Goldfish reach lower FLORES perplexities than BLOOM, XGLM, and MaLA-500 on 98 of 204 FLORES languages, despite each Goldfish model being over 10x smaller. However, the Goldfish significantly underperform larger multilingual models on reasoning benchmarks, suggesting that for low-resource languages, multilinguality primarily improves general reasoning abilities rather than basic text generation. We release models trained on 5MB (350 languages), 10MB (288 languages), 100MB (166 languages), and 1GB (83 languages) of text data where available. The Goldfish models are available as baselines, fine-tuning sources, or augmentations to existing models in low-resource NLP research, and they are further useful for crosslinguistic studies requiring maximally comparable models across languages.

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become the default approach to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) due to its significant reduction in trainable parameters. However, trainable parameter demand for LoRA increases with increasing model embedding dimensions, leading to high compute costs. Additionally, its backward updates require storing high-dimensional intermediate activations and optimizer states, demanding high peak GPU memory. In this paper, we introduce large model fine-tuning via spectrally decomposed low-dimensional adaptation (LaMDA), a novel approach to fine-tuning large language models, which leverages low-dimensional adaptation to achieve significant reductions in trainable parameters and peak GPU memory footprint. LaMDA freezes a first projection matrix (PMA) in the adaptation path while introducing a low-dimensional trainable square matrix, resulting in substantial reductions in trainable parameters and peak GPU memory usage. LaMDA gradually freezes a second projection matrix (PMB) during the early fine-tuning stages, reducing the compute cost associated with weight updates to enhance parameter efficiency further. We also present an enhancement, LaMDA++, incorporating a ``lite-weight" adaptive rank allocation for the LoRA path via normalized spectrum analysis of pre-trained model weights. We evaluate LaMDA/LaMDA++ across various tasks, including natural language understanding with the GLUE benchmark, text summarization, natural language generation, and complex reasoning on different LLMs. Results show that LaMDA matches or surpasses the performance of existing alternatives while requiring up to 17.7x fewer parameter updates and up to 1.32x lower peak GPU memory usage during fine-tuning. Code will be publicly available.

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a fixture in modern machine learning. Correspondingly, significant resources are allocated towards research that aims to further advance this technology, typically resulting in models of increasing size that are trained on increasing amounts of data. This work, however, demonstrates the surprising result that it is often possible to significantly improve the performance of LLMs by selectively removing higher-order components of their weight matrices. This simple intervention, which we call LAyer-SElective Rank reduction (LASER), can be done on a model after training has completed, and requires no additional parameters or data. We show extensive experiments demonstrating the generality of this finding across language models and datasets, and provide in-depth analyses offering insights into both when LASER is effective and the mechanism by which it operates.

Adapting medical Large Language Models to local languages can reduce barriers to accessing healthcare services, but data scarcity remains a significant challenge, particularly for low-resource languages. To address this, we first construct a high-quality medical dataset and conduct analysis to ensure its quality. In order to leverage the generalization capability of multilingual LLMs to efficiently scale to more resource-constrained languages, we explore the internal information flow of LLMs from a multilingual perspective using Mixture of Experts (MoE) modularity. Technically, we propose a novel MoE routing method that employs language-specific experts and cross-lingual routing. Inspired by circuit theory, our routing analysis revealed a Spread Out in the End information flow mechanism: while earlier layers concentrate cross-lingual information flow, the later layers exhibit language-specific divergence. This insight directly led to the development of the Post-MoE architecture, which applies sparse routing only in the later layers while maintaining dense others. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach enhances the generalization of multilingual models to other languages while preserving interpretability. Finally, to efficiently scale the model to 50 languages, we introduce the concept of language family experts, drawing on linguistic priors, which enables scaling the number of languages without adding additional parameters.

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models in a parameter-efficient manner is widely studied for its effectiveness and efficiency. The popular method of low-rank adaptation (LoRA) offers a notable approach, hypothesizing that the adaptation process is intrinsically low-dimensional. Although LoRA has demonstrated commendable performance, it is implemented with a fixed and unalterable intrinsic rank that might not always be the ideal choice. Recognizing the need for more flexible adaptation, we extend the methodology of LoRA to an innovative approach we call sparse low-rank adaptation (SoRA) that enables dynamic adjustments to the intrinsic rank during the adaptation process. We achieve this through the incorporation of a gate unit optimized with proximal gradient method in the training stage, controlling the cardinality of rank under the sparsity of the gate. In the subsequent inference stage, we eliminate the parameter blocks corresponding to the zeroed-out ranks, to reduce each SoRA module back to a concise yet rank-optimal LoRA. Our approach strengthens the representation power of LoRA by initializing it with a higher rank, while efficiently taming a temporarily increased number of parameters via updating in a sparse way. We further introduce a sparsifying scheduler for SoRA, aiming to examine the impact of the number of non-zero parameters on the model's memorization and generalization. Our experimental results demonstrate that SoRA can outperform other baselines even with 70% retained parameters and 70% training time.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is widely studied for its effectiveness and efficiency in the era of large language models. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has demonstrated commendable performance as a popular and representative method. However, it is implemented with a fixed intrinsic rank that might not be the ideal setting for the downstream tasks. Recognizing the need for more flexible downstream task adaptation, we extend the methodology of LoRA to an innovative approach we call allocating low-rank adaptation (ALoRA) that enables dynamic adjustments to the intrinsic rank during the adaptation process. First, we propose a novel method, AB-LoRA, that can effectively estimate the importance score of each LoRA rank. Second, guided by AB-LoRA, we gradually prune abundant and negatively impacting LoRA ranks and allocate the pruned LoRA budgets to important Transformer modules needing higher ranks. We have conducted experiments on various tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that our ALoRA method can outperform the recent baselines with comparable tunable parameters.

In this paper, we present the first multilingual FAQ dataset publicly available. We collected around 6M FAQ pairs from the web, in 21 different languages. Although this is significantly larger than existing FAQ retrieval datasets, it comes with its own challenges: duplication of content and uneven distribution of topics. We adopt a similar setup as Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) and test various bi-encoders on this dataset. Our experiments reveal that a multilingual model based on XLM-RoBERTa achieves the best results, except for English. Lower resources languages seem to learn from one another as a multilingual model achieves a higher MRR than language-specific ones. Our qualitative analysis reveals the brittleness of the model on simple word changes. We publicly release our dataset, model and training script.

Large-scale pretraining followed by task-specific finetuning has achieved great success in various NLP tasks. Since finetuning all parameters of large pretrained models poses substantial computational and memory challenges, several efficient finetuning methods have been developed. Among them, low-rank adaptation (LoRA), which finetunes low-rank incremental update matrices on top of frozen pretrained weights, has proven particularly effective. Nonetheless, LoRA's uniform rank assignment across all layers, along with its reliance on an exhaustive search to find the best rank, leads to high computation costs and suboptimal finetuning performance. To address these limitations, we introduce AutoLoRA, a meta learning based framework for automatically identifying the optimal rank of each LoRA layer. AutoLoRA associates each rank-1 matrix in a low-rank update matrix with a selection variable, which determines whether the rank-1 matrix should be discarded. A meta learning based method is developed to learn these selection variables. The optimal rank is determined by thresholding the values of these variables. Our comprehensive experiments on natural language understanding, generation, and sequence labeling demonstrate the effectiveness of AutoLoRA.

Despite the remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various NLP tasks, they remain vulnerable to hallucinations due to their limited parametric knowledge and lack of domain-specific expertise. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this challenge by incorporating external document retrieval to augment the knowledge base of LLMs. In this approach, RAG retrieves document chunks from an external corpus in response to a query, which are then used as context for the downstream language model to generate an answer. However, these retrieved knowledge sources often include irrelevant or erroneous information, undermining the effectiveness of RAG in downstream tasks. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a compact, efficient, and pluggable module designed to refine external knowledge sources before feeding them to the generator. The module reconstructs retrieved content by extracting the most relevant and supportive information and reorganising it into a concise, query-specific format. Through a three-stage training paradigm - comprising supervised fine-tuning, contrastive multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning-based alignment - it prioritises critical knowledge and aligns it with the generator's preferences. This method enables LLMs to produce outputs that are more accurate, reliable, and contextually appropriate.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing with exceptional task generalization capabilities. Low-Rank Adaption (LoRA) offers a cost-effective fine-tuning solution, freezing the original model parameters and training only lightweight, low-rank adapter matrices. However, the memory footprint of LoRA is largely dominated by the original model parameters. To mitigate this, we propose LoRAM, a memory-efficient LoRA training scheme founded on the intuition that many neurons in over-parameterized LLMs have low training utility but are essential for inference. LoRAM presents a unique twist: it trains on a pruned (small) model to obtain pruned low-rank matrices, which are then recovered and utilized with the original (large) model for inference. Additionally, minimal-cost continual pre-training, performed by the model publishers in advance, aligns the knowledge discrepancy between pruned and original models. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of LoRAM across various pruning strategies and downstream tasks. For a model with 70 billion parameters, LoRAM enables training on a GPU with only 20G HBM, replacing an A100-80G GPU for LoRA training and 15 GPUs for full fine-tuning. Specifically, QLoRAM implemented by structured pruning combined with 4-bit quantization, for LLaMA-3.1-70B (LLaMA-2-70B), reduces the parameter storage cost that dominates the memory usage in low-rank matrix training by 15.81times (16.95times), while achieving dominant performance gains over both the original LLaMA-3.1-70B (LLaMA-2-70B) and LoRA-trained LLaMA-3.1-8B (LLaMA-2-13B).

We present an easy and efficient method to extend existing sentence embedding models to new languages. This allows to create multilingual versions from previously monolingual models. The training is based on the idea that a translated sentence should be mapped to the same location in the vector space as the original sentence. We use the original (monolingual) model to generate sentence embeddings for the source language and then train a new system on translated sentences to mimic the original model. Compared to other methods for training multilingual sentence embeddings, this approach has several advantages: It is easy to extend existing models with relatively few samples to new languages, it is easier to ensure desired properties for the vector space, and the hardware requirements for training is lower. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for 50+ languages from various language families. Code to extend sentence embeddings models to more than 400 languages is publicly available.

Significant strides have been made in natural language tasks, largely attributed to the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs). These models, pre-trained on extensive and diverse corpora, have become increasingly capable of comprehending the intricacies of language. Despite the abundance of LLMs for many high-resource languages, the availability of such models remains limited for European Portuguese. We introduce Gl\'orIA, a robust European Portuguese decoder LLM. To pre-train Gl\'orIA, we assembled a comprehensive PT-PT text corpus comprising 35 billion tokens from various sources. We present our pre-training methodology, followed by an assessment of the model's effectiveness on multiple downstream tasks. Additionally, to evaluate our models' language modeling capabilities, we introduce CALAME-PT (Context-Aware LAnguage Modeling Evaluation for Portuguese), the first Portuguese zero-shot language-modeling benchmark. Evaluation shows that Gl\'orIA significantly outperforms existing open PT decoder models in language modeling and that it can generate sound, knowledge-rich, and coherent PT-PT text. The model also exhibits strong potential for various downstream tasks.

Adapting pretrained large language models (LLMs) to various downstream tasks in tens or hundreds of human languages is computationally expensive. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) significantly reduces the adaptation cost, by tuning only a small amount of parameters. However, directly applying PEFT methods such as LoRA (Hu et al., 2022) on diverse dataset mixtures could lead to suboptimal performance due to limited parameter capacity and negative interference among different datasets. In this work, we propose Featurized Low-rank Mixtures (FLix), a novel PEFT method designed for effective multitask multilingual tuning. FLix associates each unique dataset feature, such as the dataset's language or task, with its own low-rank weight update parameters. By composing feature-specific parameters for each dataset, FLix can accommodate diverse dataset mixtures and generalize better to unseen datasets. Our experiments show that FLix leads to significant improvements over a variety of tasks for both supervised learning and zero-shot settings using different training data mixtures.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable generalization toward multiple tasks and languages. Nonetheless, the generalization of PLMs towards unseen languages is poor, resulting in significantly worse language performance, or even generating nonsensical responses that are comparable to a random baseline. This limitation has been a longstanding problem of PLMs raising the problem of diversity and equal access to language modeling technology. In this work, we solve this limitation by introducing LinguAlchemy, a regularization technique that incorporates various aspects of languages covering typological, geographical, and phylogenetic constraining the resulting representation of PLMs to better characterize the corresponding linguistics constraints. LinguAlchemy significantly improves the accuracy performance of mBERT and XLM-R on unseen languages by ~18% and ~2%, respectively compared to fully finetuned models and displaying a high degree of unseen language generalization. We further introduce AlchemyScale and AlchemyTune, extension of LinguAlchemy which adjusts the linguistic regularization weights automatically, alleviating the need for hyperparameter search. LinguAlchemy enables better cross-lingual generalization to unseen languages which is vital for better inclusivity and accessibility of PLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in recent years; however, their excellent performance is still largely limited to major world languages, primarily English. Many LLMs continue to face challenges with multilingual tasks, especially when it comes to low-resource languages. To address this issue, we introduced Marco-LLM: Massive multilingual training for cross-lingual enhancement LLM. We have collected a substantial amount of multilingual data for several low-resource languages and conducted extensive continual pre-training using the Qwen2 models. This effort has resulted in a multilingual LLM named Marco-LLM. Through comprehensive evaluations on various multilingual benchmarks, including MMMLU, AGIEval, Belebele, Flores-200, XCOPA and many others, Marco-LLM has demonstrated substantial improvements over state-of-the-art LLMs. Furthermore, Marco-LLM achieved substantial enhancements in any-to-any machine translation tasks, showing the effectiveness of our multilingual LLM. Marco-LLM is a pioneering multilingual LLM designed to not only perform exceptionally well in multilingual tasks, including low-resource languages, but also maintain strong performance in English and other major languages, closing the performance gap between high- and low-resource language capabilities. By bridging languages, this effort demonstrates our dedication to ensuring LLMs work accurately across various languages.

We present Mr. TyDi, a multi-lingual benchmark dataset for mono-lingual retrieval in eleven typologically diverse languages, designed to evaluate ranking with learned dense representations. The goal of this resource is to spur research in dense retrieval techniques in non-English languages, motivated by recent observations that existing techniques for representation learning perform poorly when applied to out-of-distribution data. As a starting point, we provide zero-shot baselines for this new dataset based on a multi-lingual adaptation of DPR that we call "mDPR". Experiments show that although the effectiveness of mDPR is much lower than BM25, dense representations nevertheless appear to provide valuable relevance signals, improving BM25 results in sparse-dense hybrids. In addition to analyses of our results, we also discuss future challenges and present a research agenda in multi-lingual dense retrieval. Mr. TyDi can be downloaded at https://github.com/castorini/mr.tydi.

In this paper, we propose a novel LLM-Neo framework that efficiently transfers knowledge from a large language model (LLM) teacher to a compact student. Initially, we revisit the knowledge distillation (KD) and low-rank adaption (LoRA), and argue that they share the same paradigm. Inspired by this observation, we explore the strategy that combines LoRA and KD to enhance the efficiency of knowledge transfer. We first summarize some guidelines for this design and further develop the LLM-Neo. Experimental results on compressing Llama 2 and Llama 3 show that LLM-Neo outperforms various baselines. Further analysis demonstrates the robustness of the proposed LLM-Neo on variants of LoRA. The trained models have been available at https://huggingface.co/collections/yang31210999/llm-neo-66e3c882f5579b829ff57eba{this repository}.

The number of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasing steadily, though the majority are designed predominantly for the English language. While state-of-the-art LLMs can handle other languages, due to language contamination or some degree of multilingual pretraining data, they are not optimized for non-English languages, leading to inefficient encoding (high token "fertility") and slower inference speed. In this work, we thoroughly compare a variety of vocabulary adaptation techniques for optimizing English LLMs for the Italian language, and put forward Semantic Alignment Vocabulary Adaptation (SAVA), a novel method that leverages neural mapping for vocabulary substitution. SAVA achieves competitive performance across multiple downstream tasks, enhancing grounded alignment strategies. We adapt two LLMs: Mistral-7b-v0.1, reducing token fertility by 25\%, and Llama-3.1-8B, optimizing the vocabulary and reducing the number of parameters by 1 billion. We show that, following the adaptation of the vocabulary, these models can recover their performance with a relatively limited stage of continual training on the target language. Finally, we test the capabilities of the adapted models on various multi-choice and generative tasks.

In this work, we provide a systematic and comprehensive empirical comparison of pretrained multilingual language models versus their monolingual counterparts with regard to their monolingual task performance. We study a set of nine typologically diverse languages with readily available pretrained monolingual models on a set of five diverse monolingual downstream tasks. We first aim to establish, via fair and controlled comparisons, if a gap between the multilingual and the corresponding monolingual representation of that language exists, and subsequently investigate the reason for any performance difference. To disentangle conflating factors, we train new monolingual models on the same data, with monolingually and multilingually trained tokenizers. We find that while the pretraining data size is an important factor, a designated monolingual tokenizer plays an equally important role in the downstream performance. Our results show that languages that are adequately represented in the multilingual model's vocabulary exhibit negligible performance decreases over their monolingual counterparts. We further find that replacing the original multilingual tokenizer with the specialized monolingual tokenizer improves the downstream performance of the multilingual model for almost every task and language.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a crucial method for efficiently fine-tuning pretrained large language models (LLMs), with its performance largely influenced by two key factors: rank and initialization strategy. Numerous LoRA variants have been proposed to enhance its performance by addressing these factors. However, these variants often compromise LoRA's usability or efficiency. In this paper, we analyze the fundamental limitations of existing methods and introduce a novel approach, GoRA (Gradient-driven Adaptive Low Rank Adaptation), which adaptively assigns ranks and initializes weights for low-rank adapters simultaneously based on gradient information. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GoRA significantly improves performance while preserving the high usability and efficiency of LoRA. On the T5 model fine-tuned for the GLUE benchmark, GoRA achieves a 5.88-point improvement over LoRA and slightly surpasses full fine-tuning. Similarly, on the Llama3.1-8B-Base model fine-tuned for GSM8k tasks, GoRA outperforms LoRA with a 5.13-point improvement and exceeds full fine-tuning in high-rank settings by a margin of 2.05 points.

While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables parameter-efficient fine-tuning for Large Language Models (LLMs), its performance often falls short of Full Fine-Tuning (Full FT). Current methods optimize LoRA by initializing with static singular value decomposition (SVD) subsets, leading to suboptimal leveraging of pre-trained knowledge. Another path for improving LoRA is incorporating a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. However, weight misalignment and complex gradient dynamics make it challenging to adopt SVD prior to the LoRA MoE architecture. To mitigate these issues, we propose Great LoRA Mixture-of-Expert (GOAT), a framework that (1) adaptively integrates relevant priors using an SVD-structured MoE, and (2) aligns optimization with full fine-tuned MoE by deriving a theoretical scaling factor. We demonstrate that proper scaling, without modifying the architecture or training algorithms, boosts LoRA MoE's efficiency and performance. Experiments across 25 datasets, including natural language understanding, commonsense reasoning, image classification, and natural language generation, demonstrate GOAT's state-of-the-art performance, closing the gap with Full FT.

We study the selection of transfer languages for automatic abusive language detection. Instead of preparing a dataset for every language, we demonstrate the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer learning for zero-shot abusive language detection. This way we can use existing data from higher-resource languages to build better detection systems for low-resource languages. Our datasets are from seven different languages from three language families. We measure the distance between the languages using several language similarity measures, especially by quantifying the World Atlas of Language Structures. We show that there is a correlation between linguistic similarity and classifier performance. This discovery allows us to choose an optimal transfer language for zero shot abusive language detection.

In this paper, we present a new embedding model, called M3-Embedding, which is distinguished for its versatility in Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, and Multi-Granularity. It can support more than 100 working languages, leading to new state-of-the-art performances on multi-lingual and cross-lingual retrieval tasks. It can simultaneously perform the three common retrieval functionalities of embedding model: dense retrieval, multi-vector retrieval, and sparse retrieval, which provides a unified model foundation for real-world IR applications. It is able to process inputs of different granularities, spanning from short sentences to long documents of up to 8192 tokens. The effective training of M3-Embedding involves the following technical contributions. We propose a novel self-knowledge distillation approach, where the relevance scores from different retrieval functionalities can be integrated as the teacher signal to enhance the training quality. We also optimize the batching strategy, enabling a large batch size and high training throughput to ensure the discriminativeness of embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, M3-Embedding is the first embedding model which realizes such a strong versatility. The model and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding.

In this study, we introduce Orion-14B, a collection of multilingual large language models with 14 billion parameters. We utilize a data scheduling approach to train a foundational model on a diverse corpus of 2.5 trillion tokens, sourced from texts in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other languages. Additionally, we fine-tuned a series of models tailored for conversational applications and other specific use cases. Our evaluation results demonstrate that Orion-14B achieves state-of-the-art performance across a broad spectrum of tasks. We make the Orion-14B model family and its associated code publicly accessible https://github.com/OrionStarAI/Orion, aiming to inspire future research and practical applications in the field.

We introduce a novel suite of state-of-the-art bilingual text embedding models that are designed to support English and another target language. These models are capable of processing lengthy text inputs with up to 8192 tokens, making them highly versatile for a range of natural language processing tasks such as text retrieval, clustering, and semantic textual similarity (STS) calculations. By focusing on bilingual models and introducing a unique multi-task learning objective, we have significantly improved the model performance on STS tasks, which outperforms the capabilities of existing multilingual models in both target language understanding and cross-lingual evaluation tasks. Moreover, our bilingual models are more efficient, requiring fewer parameters and less memory due to their smaller vocabulary needs. Furthermore, we have expanded the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) to include benchmarks for German and Spanish embedding models. This integration aims to stimulate further research and advancement in text embedding technologies for these languages.

Despite the widespread availability of LLMs, there remains a substantial gap in their capabilities and availability across diverse languages. One approach to address these issues has been to take an existing pre-trained LLM and continue to train it on new languages. While prior works have experimented with language adaptation, many questions around best practices and methodology have not been covered. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation into the adaptation of LLMs to new languages. Our study covers the key components in this process, including vocabulary extension, direct preference optimization and the data scarcity problem for human alignment in low-resource languages. We scale these experiments across 9 languages and 2 parameter scales (7B and 70B). We compare our models against Llama 2, Aya-101, XGLM, BLOOM and existing language experts, outperforming all prior published baselines. Additionally, all evaluation code and checkpoints are made public to facilitate future research.

Although fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with multilingual data can rapidly enhance the multilingual capabilities of LLMs, they still exhibit a performance gap between the dominant language (e.g., English) and non-dominant ones due to the imbalance of training data across languages. To further enhance the performance of non-dominant languages, we propose ShifCon, a Shift-based Contrastive framework that aligns the internal forward process of other languages toward that of the dominant one. Specifically, it shifts the representations of non-dominant languages into the dominant language subspace, allowing them to access relatively rich information encoded in the model parameters. The enriched representations are then shifted back into their original language subspace before generation. Moreover, we introduce a subspace distance metric to pinpoint the optimal layer area for shifting representations and employ multilingual contrastive learning to further enhance the alignment of representations within this area. Experiments demonstrate that our ShifCon framework significantly enhances the performance of non-dominant languages, particularly for low-resource ones. Further analysis offers extra insights to verify the effectiveness of ShifCon and propel future research

Large language models like ChatGPT have shown substantial progress in natural language understanding and generation, proving valuable across various disciplines, including the medical field. Despite advancements, challenges persist due to the complexity and diversity inherent in medical tasks which often require multi-task learning capabilities. Previous approaches, although beneficial, fall short in real-world applications because they necessitate task-specific annotations at inference time, limiting broader generalization. This paper introduces MING-MOE, a novel Mixture-of-Expert~(MOE)-based medical large language model designed to manage diverse and complex medical tasks without requiring task-specific annotations, thus enhancing its usability across extensive datasets. MING-MOE employs a Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation (MoLoRA) technique, allowing for efficient parameter usage by maintaining base model parameters static while adapting through a minimal set of trainable parameters. We demonstrate that MING-MOE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on over 20 medical tasks, illustrating a significant improvement over existing models. This approach not only extends the capabilities of medical language models but also improves inference efficiency.

We introduce jina-embeddings-v3, a novel text embedding model with 570 million parameters, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multilingual data and long-context retrieval tasks, supporting context lengths of up to 8192 tokens. The model includes a set of task-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters to generate high-quality embeddings for query-document retrieval, clustering, classification, and text matching. Additionally, Matryoshka Representation Learning is integrated into the training process, allowing flexible truncation of embedding dimensions without compromising performance. Evaluation on the MTEB benchmark shows that jina-embeddings-v3 outperforms the latest proprietary embeddings from OpenAI and Cohere on English tasks, while achieving superior performance compared to multilingual-e5-large-instruct across all multilingual tasks.

As one of the most popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is commonly applied to fine-tune large language models (LLMs). However, updating the weights of LoRA blocks effectively and expeditiously is challenging due to the long calculation path in the original model. To address this, we propose ResLoRA, an improved framework of LoRA. By adding residual paths during training and using merging approaches to eliminate these extra paths during inference, our method can achieve better results in fewer training steps without any extra trainable parameters or inference cost compared to LoRA. The experiments on NLG, NLU, and text-to-image tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. To the best of our knowledge, ResLoRA is the first work that combines the residual path with LoRA. The code of our method is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps/tree/main/reslora .

Through the integration of external tools, large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o and Llama 3.1 significantly expand their functional capabilities, evolving from elementary conversational agents to general-purpose assistants. We argue that the primary drivers of these advancements are the quality and diversity of the training data. However, the existing LLMs with external tool integration provide only limited transparency regarding their datasets and data collection methods, which has led to the initiation of this research. Specifically, in this paper, our objective is to elucidate the detailed process involved in constructing datasets that empower LLMs to effectively learn how to utilize external tools and make this information available to the public through the introduction of ToolBridge. ToolBridge proposes to employ a collection of general open-access datasets as its raw dataset pool and applies a series of strategies to identify appropriate data entries from the pool for external tool API insertions. By supervised fine-tuning on these curated data entries, LLMs can invoke external tools in appropriate contexts to boost their predictive accuracy, particularly for basic functions including data processing, numerical computation, and factual retrieval. Our experiments rigorously isolates model architectures and training configurations, focusing exclusively on the role of data. The experimental results indicate that LLMs trained on ToolBridge demonstrate consistent performance improvements on both standard benchmarks and custom evaluation datasets. All the associated code and data will be open-source at https://github.com/CharlesPikachu/ToolBridge, promoting transparency and facilitating the broader community to explore approaches for equipping LLMs with external tools capabilities.

Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) require massive amounts of text data, and the performance of the LLMs typically correlates with the scale and quality of the datasets. This means that it may be challenging to build LLMs for smaller languages such as Nordic ones, where the availability of text corpora is limited. In order to facilitate the development of the LLMS in the Nordic languages, we curate a high-quality dataset consisting of 1.2TB of text, in all of the major North Germanic languages (Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish), as well as some high-quality English data. This paper details our considerations and processes for collecting, cleaning, and filtering the dataset.

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.

While large language models (LLMs) are empowered with broad knowledge, their task-specific performance is often suboptimal. It necessitates fine-tuning LLMs with task-specific data, but such data may be inaccessible due to privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance LLMs with smaller language models (SLMs) that are trained on clients using their private task-specific data. To enable mutual enhancement between LLMs and SLMs, we propose CrossLM, where the SLMs promote the LLM to generate task-specific high-quality data, and both the LLM and SLMs are enhanced with the generated data. We evaluate CrossLM using publicly accessible language models across a range of benchmark tasks. The results demonstrate that CrossLM significantly enhances the task-specific performance of SLMs on clients and the LLM on the cloud server simultaneously while preserving the LLM's generalization capability.

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants have recently gained much interest due to their ability to avoid excessive inference costs. However, LoRA still encounters the following challenges: (1) Limitation of low-rank assumption; and (2) Its initialization method may be suboptimal. To this end, we propose PMSS(Pre-trained Matrices Skeleton Selection), which enables high-rank updates with low costs while leveraging semantic and linguistic information inherent in pre-trained weight. It achieves this by selecting skeletons from the pre-trained weight matrix and only learning a small matrix instead. Experiments demonstrate that PMSS outperforms LoRA and other fine-tuning methods across tasks with much less trainable parameters. We demonstrate its effectiveness, especially in handling complex tasks such as DROP benchmark(+3.4%/+5.9% on LLaMA2-7B/13B) and math reasoning(+12.89%/+5.61%/+3.11% on LLaMA2-7B, Mistral-7B and Gemma-7B of GSM8K). The code and model will be released soon.

Recent studies integrate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to further enhance the performance of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods in Large Language Model (LLM) applications. Existing methods employ homogeneous MoE-LoRA architectures composed of LoRA experts with either similar or identical structures and capacities. However, these approaches often suffer from representation collapse and expert load imbalance, which negatively impact the potential of LLMs. To address these challenges, we propose a heterogeneous Mixture-of-Adapters (MoA) approach. This method dynamically integrates PEFT adapter experts with diverse structures, leveraging their complementary representational capabilities to foster expert specialization, thereby enhancing the effective transfer of pre-trained knowledge to downstream tasks. MoA supports two variants: (i) Soft MoA achieves fine-grained integration by performing a weighted fusion of all expert outputs; (ii) Sparse MoA activates adapter experts sparsely based on their contribution, achieving this with negligible performance degradation. Experimental results demonstrate that heterogeneous MoA outperforms homogeneous MoE-LoRA methods in both performance and parameter efficiency. Our project is available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/MoA.

Natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed a profound impact of large language models (LLMs) that excel in a multitude of tasks. However, the limitation of LLMs in multilingual settings, particularly in underrepresented languages, remains a significant hurdle. This thesis aims to bridge the gap in NLP research and development by focusing on underrepresented languages. A comprehensive evaluation of LLMs is conducted to assess their capabilities in these languages, revealing the challenges of multilingual and multicultural generalization. Addressing the multilingual generalization gap, this thesis proposes data-and-compute-efficient methods to mitigate the disparity in LLM ability in underrepresented languages, allowing better generalization on underrepresented languages without the loss of task generalization ability. The proposed solutions cover cross-lingual continual instruction tuning, retrieval-based cross-lingual in-context learning, and in-context query alignment. Furthermore, a novel method to measure cultural values alignment between LLMs operating in different languages is proposed, ensuring cultural sensitivity and inclusivity. These contributions aim to enhance the multilingual and multicultural alignment of LLMs in underrepresented languages, ultimately advancing the NLP field toward greater equality and inclusiveness.

As the adoption of large language models increases and the need for per-user or per-task model customization grows, the parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants, incur substantial storage and transmission costs. To further reduce stored parameters, we introduce a "divide-and-share" paradigm that breaks the barriers of low-rank decomposition across matrix dimensions, modules and layers by sharing parameters globally via a vector bank. As an instantiation of the paradigm to LoRA, our proposed VB-LoRA composites all the low-rank matrices of LoRA from a shared vector bank with a differentiable top-k admixture module. VB-LoRA achieves extreme parameter efficiency while maintaining comparable or better performance compared to state-of-the-art PEFT methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VB-LoRA on natural language understanding, natural language generation, and instruction tuning tasks. When fine-tuning the Llama2-13B model, VB-LoRA only uses 0.4% of LoRA's stored parameters, yet achieves superior results. Our source code is available at https://github.com/leo-yangli/VB-LoRA.

Intent classification and slot-filling are essential tasks of Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). In most SLUsystems, those tasks are realized by independent modules. For about fifteen years, models achieving both of themjointly and exploiting their mutual enhancement have been proposed. A multilingual module using a joint modelwas envisioned to create a touristic dialogue system for a European project, HumanE-AI-Net. A combination ofmultiple datasets, including the MEDIA dataset, was suggested for training this joint model. The MEDIA SLU datasetis a French dataset distributed since 2005 by ELRA, mainly used by the French research community and free foracademic research since 2020. Unfortunately, it is annotated only in slots but not intents. An enhanced version ofMEDIA annotated with intents has been built to extend its use to more tasks and use cases. This paper presents thesemi-automatic methodology used to obtain this enhanced version. In addition, we present the first results of SLUexperiments on this enhanced dataset using joint models for intent classification and slot-filling.

The increase in technological adoption worldwide comes with demands for novel tools to be used by the general population. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a great opportunity in this respect, but their capabilities remain limited for low-resource languages, restricting applications in countries where such languages are spoken. We create several resources to facilitate the adoption of LLMs and to support research advancements for Macedonian. We collect the largest Macedonian corpus to date, consisting of 40GB of textual data and totaling 3.5B words. To support conversational applications, we collect a 106k-instance instruction dataset, carefully built to be culturally grounded. For evaluation, we construct a Macedonian evaluation suite covering seven benchmarks. Finally, we train domestic-yak, a state-of-the-art 8B-parameter model, on our curated datasets and evaluate it against eight baseline models using the newly constructed benchmark suite. Our model outperforms all existing models in the 8B parameter range across all benchmarks, and achieves performance comparable to models up to 10x larger. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis with native speakers reveals that our model is preferred over larger counterparts, receiving higher ratings for grammatical correctness and cultural appropriateness. All datasets, code, and model weights are openly released, setting a foundation for advancing LLMs in similarly underrepresented languages. These resources are publicly available at github.com/LVSTCK for source code, and at huggingface.co/LVSTCK for pretrained model weights and data.

Large language models (LLMs) showcase increasingly impressive English benchmark scores, however their performance profiles remain inconsistent across multilingual settings. To address this gap, we introduce PolyPrompt, a novel, parameter-efficient framework for enhancing the multilingual capabilities of LLMs. Our method learns a set of trigger tokens for each language through a gradient-based search, identifying the input query's language and selecting the corresponding trigger tokens which are prepended to the prompt during inference. We perform experiments on two ~1 billion parameter models, with evaluations on the global MMLU benchmark across fifteen typologically and resource diverse languages, demonstrating accuracy gains of 3.7%-19.9% compared to naive and translation-pipeline baselines.

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become the standard approach for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLM), but our theoretical understanding of LoRA has been limited. In this work, we theoretically analyze LoRA fine-tuning in the neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime with N data points, showing: (i) full fine-tuning (without LoRA) admits a low-rank solution of rank rlesssim N; (ii) using LoRA with rank rgtrsim N eliminates spurious local minima, allowing gradient descent to find the low-rank solutions; (iii) the low-rank solution found using LoRA generalizes well.

Despite the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, there remains a linguistic bias that favors high-resource languages, such as English, often at the expense of low-resource and regional languages. To address this imbalance, we introduce SeaLLMs, an innovative series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. SeaLLMs are built upon the Llama-2 model and further advanced through continued pre-training with an extended vocabulary, specialized instruction and alignment tuning to better capture the intricacies of regional languages. This allows them to respect and reflect local cultural norms, customs, stylistic preferences, and legal considerations. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SeaLLM-13b models exhibit superior performance across a wide spectrum of linguistic tasks and assistant-style instruction-following capabilities relative to comparable open-source models. Moreover, they outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages, such as Thai, Khmer, Lao, and Burmese, by large margins while remaining lightweight and cost-effective to operate.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable ability to comprehend, reason, and generate following nature language instructions. However, the development of LLMs has been primarily focused on high-resource languages, such as English, thereby limiting their applicability and research in other languages. Consequently, we present PolyLM, a multilingual LLM trained on 640 billion (B) tokens, avaliable in two model sizes: 1.7B and 13B. To enhance its multilingual capabilities, we 1) integrate bilingual data into training data; and 2) adopt a curriculum learning strategy that increases the proportion of non-English data from 30% in the first stage to 60% in the final stage during pre-training. Further, we propose a multilingual self-instruct method which automatically generates 132.7K diverse multilingual instructions for model fine-tuning. To assess the model's performance, we collect several existing multilingual tasks, including multilingual understanding, question answering, generation, and translation. Extensive experiments show that PolyLM surpasses other open-source models such as LLaMA and BLOOM on multilingual tasks while maintaining comparable performance in English. Our models, alone with the instruction data and multilingual benchmark, are available at: https://modelscope.cn/models/damo/nlp_polylm_13b_text_generation.

Large, multilingual language models exhibit surprisingly good zero- or few-shot machine translation capabilities, despite having never seen the intentionally-included translation examples provided to typical neural translation systems. We investigate the role of incidental bilingualism -- the unintentional consumption of bilingual signals, including translation examples -- in explaining the translation capabilities of large language models, taking the Pathways Language Model (PaLM) as a case study. We introduce a mixed-method approach to measure and understand incidental bilingualism at scale. We show that PaLM is exposed to over 30 million translation pairs across at least 44 languages. Furthermore, the amount of incidental bilingual content is highly correlated with the amount of monolingual in-language content for non-English languages. We relate incidental bilingual content to zero-shot prompts and show that it can be used to mine new prompts to improve PaLM's out-of-English zero-shot translation quality. Finally, in a series of small-scale ablations, we show that its presence has a substantial impact on translation capabilities, although this impact diminishes with model scale.

Training large language models (LLMs) in low-resource languages such as Hebrew poses unique challenges. In this paper, we introduce DictaLM2.0 and DictaLM2.0-Instruct, two LLMs derived from the Mistral model, trained on a substantial corpus of approximately 200 billion tokens in both Hebrew and English. Adapting a pre-trained model to a new language involves specialized techniques that differ significantly from training a model from scratch or further training existing models on well-resourced languages such as English. We outline these novel training methodologies, which facilitate effective learning and adaptation to the linguistic properties of Hebrew. Additionally, we fine-tuned DictaLM2.0-Instruct on a comprehensive instruct dataset to enhance its performance on task-specific instructions. To rigorously evaluate our models, we introduce a new benchmark suite for Hebrew LLM evaluation, covering a diverse set of tasks including Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis, Winograd Schema Challenge, Translation, and Summarization. Our work not only addresses the intricacies of training LLMs in low-resource languages but also proposes a framework that can be leveraged for adapting other LLMs to various non-English languages, contributing to the broader field of multilingual NLP.

We explore the potential of pixel-based models for transfer learning from standard languages to dialects. These models convert text into images that are divided into patches, enabling a continuous vocabulary representation that proves especially useful for out-of-vocabulary words common in dialectal data. Using German as a case study, we compare the performance of pixel-based models to token-based models across various syntactic and semantic tasks. Our results show that pixel-based models outperform token-based models in part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and intent detection for zero-shot dialect evaluation by up to 26 percentage points in some scenarios, though not in Standard German. However, pixel-based models fall short in topic classification. These findings emphasize the potential of pixel-based models for handling dialectal data, though further research should be conducted to assess their effectiveness in various linguistic contexts.

The world of language models is going through turbulent times, better and ever larger models are coming out at an unprecedented speed. However, we argue that, especially for the scientific community, encoder models of up to 1 billion parameters are still very much needed, their primary usage being in enriching large collections of data with metadata necessary for downstream research. We investigate the best way to ensure the existence of such encoder models on the set of very closely related languages - Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, by setting up a diverse benchmark for these languages, and comparing the trained-from-scratch models with the new models constructed via additional pretraining of existing multilingual models. We show that comparable performance to dedicated from-scratch models can be obtained by additionally pretraining available multilingual models even with a limited amount of computation. We also show that neighboring languages, in our case Slovenian, can be included in the additional pretraining with little to no loss in the performance of the final model.

Related works used indexes like CKA and variants of CCA to measure the similarity of cross-lingual representations in multilingual language models. In this paper, we argue that assumptions of CKA/CCA align poorly with one of the motivating goals of cross-lingual learning analysis, i.e., explaining zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. We highlight what valuable aspects of cross-lingual similarity these indexes fail to capture and provide a motivating case study demonstrating the problem empirically. Then, we introduce Average Neuron-Wise Correlation (ANC) as a straightforward alternative that is exempt from the difficulties of CKA/CCA and is good specifically in a cross-lingual context. Finally, we use ANC to construct evidence that the previously introduced ``first align, then predict'' pattern takes place not only in masked language models (MLMs) but also in multilingual models with causal language modeling objectives (CLMs). Moreover, we show that the pattern extends to the scaled versions of the MLMs and CLMs (up to 85x original mBERT).Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/TartuNLP/xsim}

Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (mRAG) systems enhance language models by integrating external multilingual information to produce context-aware responses. However, mRAG systems struggle with retrieving relevant information due to linguistic variations between queries and documents, generating inconsistent responses when multilingual sources conflict. In this work, we systematically investigate language preferences in both retrieval and generation of mRAG through a series of experiments. Our analysis indicates that retrievers tend to prefer high-resource and query languages, yet this preference does not consistently improve generation performance. Moreover, we observe that generators prefer the query language or Latin scripts, leading to inconsistent outputs. To overcome these issues, we propose Dual Knowledge Multilingual RAG (DKM-RAG), a simple yet effective framework that fuses translated multilingual passages with complementary model knowledge. Empirical results demonstrate that DKM-RAG mitigates language preference in generation and enhances performance across diverse linguistic settings.

In NLP, Zero-Shot Classification (ZSC) has become essential for enabling models to classify text into categories unseen during training, particularly in low-resource languages and domains where labeled data is scarce. While pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown promise in ZSC, they often rely on large training datasets or external knowledge, limiting their applicability in multilingual and low-resource scenarios. Recent approaches leveraging natural language prompts reduce the dependence on large training datasets but struggle to effectively incorporate available labeled data from related classification tasks, especially when these datasets originate from different languages or distributions. Moreover, existing prompt-based methods typically rely on manually crafted prompts in a specific language, limiting their adaptability and effectiveness in cross-lingual settings. To address these challenges, we introduce RoSPrompt, a lightweight and data-efficient approach for training soft prompts that enhance cross-lingual ZSC while ensuring robust generalization across data distribution shifts. RoSPrompt is designed for small multilingual PLMs, enabling them to leverage high-resource languages to improve performance in low-resource settings without requiring extensive fine-tuning or high computational costs. We evaluate our approach on multiple multilingual PLMs across datasets covering 106 languages, demonstrating strong cross-lingual transfer performance and robust generalization capabilities over unseen classes.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) even when trained without parallel data. Yet, despite the fact that the amount of training data is gigantic, they still struggle with translating rare words, particularly for low-resource languages. Even worse, it is usually unrealistic to retrieve relevant demonstrations for in-context learning with low-resource languages on LLMs, which restricts the practical use of LLMs for translation -- how should we mitigate this problem? To this end, we present a novel method, CoD, which augments LLMs with prior knowledge with the chains of multilingual dictionaries for a subset of input words to elicit translation abilities for LLMs. Extensive experiments indicate that augmenting ChatGPT with CoD elicits large gains by up to 13x ChrF++ points for MNMT (3.08 to 42.63 for English to Serbian written in Cyrillic script) on FLORES-200 full devtest set. We further demonstrate the importance of chaining the multilingual dictionaries, as well as the superiority of CoD to few-shot demonstration for low-resource languages.

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the latest research on multilingual large language models (MLLMs). MLLMs not only are able to understand and generate language across linguistic boundaries, but also represent an important advancement in artificial intelligence. We first discuss the architecture and pre-training objectives of MLLMs, highlighting the key components and methodologies that contribute to their multilingual capabilities. We then discuss the construction of multilingual pre-training and alignment datasets, underscoring the importance of data quality and diversity in enhancing MLLM performance. An important focus of this survey is on the evaluation of MLLMs. We present a detailed taxonomy and roadmap covering the assessment of MLLMs' cross-lingual knowledge, reasoning, alignment with human values, safety, interpretability and specialized applications. Specifically, we extensively discuss multilingual evaluation benchmarks and datasets, and explore the use of LLMs themselves as multilingual evaluators. To enhance MLLMs from black to white boxes, we also address the interpretability of multilingual capabilities, cross-lingual transfer and language bias within these models. Finally, we provide a comprehensive review of real-world applications of MLLMs across diverse domains, including biology, medicine, computer science, mathematics and law. We showcase how these models have driven innovation and improvements in these specialized fields while also highlighting the challenges and opportunities in deploying MLLMs within diverse language communities and application scenarios. We listed the paper related in this survey and publicly available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/Awesome-Multilingual-LLMs-Papers.

In this paper we generalize and extend an idea of low-rank adaptation (LoRA) of large language models (LLMs) based on Transformer architecture. Widely used LoRA-like methods of fine-tuning LLMs are based on matrix factorization of gradient update. We introduce LoTR, a novel approach for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of LLMs which represents a gradient update to parameters in a form of tensor decomposition. Low-rank adapter for each layer is constructed as a product of three matrices, and tensor structure arises from sharing left and right multipliers of this product among layers. Simultaneous compression of a sequence of layers with low-rank tensor representation allows LoTR to archive even better parameter efficiency then LoRA especially for deep models. Moreover, the core tensor does not depend on original weight dimension and can be made arbitrary small, which allows for extremely cheap and fast downstream fine-tuning.

Retrieve-and-rerank is a popular retrieval pipeline because of its ability to make slow but effective rerankers efficient enough at query time by reducing the number of comparisons. Recent works in neural rerankers take advantage of large language models for their capability in reasoning between queries and passages and have achieved state-of-the-art retrieval effectiveness. However, such rerankers are resource-intensive, even after heavy optimization. In this work, we introduce Rank-K, a listwise passage reranking model that leverages the reasoning capability of the reasoning language model at query time that provides test time scalability to serve hard queries. We show that Rank-K improves retrieval effectiveness by 23\% over the RankZephyr, the state-of-the-art listwise reranker, when reranking a BM25 initial ranked list and 19\% when reranking strong retrieval results by SPLADE-v3. Since Rank-K is inherently a multilingual model, we found that it ranks passages based on queries in different languages as effectively as it does in monolingual retrieval.

Instruction-following capability has become a major ability to be evaluated for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing datasets, such as IFEval, are either predominantly monolingual and centered on English or simply machine translated to other languages, limiting their applicability in multilingual contexts. In this paper, we present an carefully-curated extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version named Marco-Bench-MIF, covering 30 languages with varying levels of localization. Our benchmark addresses linguistic constraints (e.g., modifying capitalization requirements for Chinese) and cultural references (e.g., substituting region-specific company names in prompts) via a hybrid pipeline combining translation with verification. Through comprehensive evaluation of 20+ LLMs on our Marco-Bench-MIF, we found that: (1) 25-35% accuracy gap between high/low-resource languages, (2) model scales largely impact performance by 45-60% yet persists script-specific challenges, and (3) machine-translated data underestimates accuracy by7-22% versus localized data. Our analysis identifies challenges in multilingual instruction following, including keyword consistency preservation and compositional constraint adherence across languages. Our Marco-Bench-MIF is available at https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Marco-Bench-MIF.

We propose a method to fuse frozen text-only large language models (LLMs) with pre-trained image encoder and decoder models, by mapping between their embedding spaces. Our model demonstrates a wide suite of multimodal capabilities: image retrieval, novel image generation, and multimodal dialogue. Ours is the first approach capable of conditioning on arbitrarily interleaved image and text inputs to generate coherent image (and text) outputs. To achieve strong performance on image generation, we propose an efficient mapping network to ground the LLM to an off-the-shelf text-to-image generation model. This mapping network translates hidden representations of text into the embedding space of the visual models, enabling us to leverage the strong text representations of the LLM for visual outputs. Our approach outperforms baseline generation models on tasks with longer and more complex language. In addition to novel image generation, our model is also capable of image retrieval from a prespecified dataset, and decides whether to retrieve or generate at inference time. This is done with a learnt decision module which conditions on the hidden representations of the LLM. Our model exhibits a wider range of capabilities compared to prior multimodal language models. It can process image-and-text inputs, and produce retrieved images, generated images, and generated text -- outperforming non-LLM based generation models across several text-to-image tasks that measure context dependence.

A primary challenge in large language model (LLM) development is their onerous pre-training cost. Typically, such pre-training involves optimizing a self-supervised objective (such as next-token prediction) over a large corpus. This paper explores a promising paradigm to improve LLM pre-training efficiency and quality by suitably leveraging a small language model (SLM). In particular, this paradigm relies on an SLM to both (1) provide soft labels as additional training supervision, and (2) select a small subset of valuable ("informative" and "hard") training examples. Put together, this enables an effective transfer of the SLM's predictive distribution to the LLM, while prioritizing specific regions of the training data distribution. Empirically, this leads to reduced LLM training time compared to standard training, while improving the overall quality. Theoretically, we develop a statistical framework to systematically study the utility of SLMs in enabling efficient training of high-quality LLMs. In particular, our framework characterizes how the SLM's seemingly low-quality supervision can enhance the training of a much more capable LLM. Furthermore, it also highlights the need for an adaptive utilization of such supervision, by striking a balance between the bias and variance introduced by the SLM-provided soft labels. We corroborate our theoretical framework by improving the pre-training of an LLM with 2.8B parameters by utilizing a smaller LM with 1.5B parameters on the Pile dataset.

One of the most reliable ways to create deployable models for specialized tasks is to obtain an adequate amount of high-quality task-specific data. However, for specialized tasks, often such datasets do not exist. Existing methods address this by creating such data from large language models (LLMs) and then distilling such knowledge into smaller models. However, these methods are limited by the quality of the LLMs output, and tend to generate repetitive or incorrect data. In this work, we present Retrieval Based Distillation (ReBase), a method that first retrieves data from rich online sources and then transforms them into domain-specific data. This method greatly enhances data diversity. Moreover, ReBase generates Chain-of-Thought reasoning and distills the reasoning capacity of LLMs. We test our method on 4 benchmarks and results show that our method significantly improves performance by up to 7.8% on SQuAD, 1.37% on MNLI, and 1.94% on BigBench-Hard.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) with their impressive language understanding and generation capabilities. However, their performance may be suboptimal for domain-specific tasks that require specialized knowledge due to limited exposure to the related data. Additionally, the lack of transparency of most state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, which can only be accessed via APIs, impedes further fine-tuning with domain custom data. Moreover, providing private data to the LLMs' owner leads to data privacy problems. To address these challenges, we propose the novel Parametric Knowledge Guiding (PKG) framework, which equips LLMs with a knowledge-guiding module to access relevant knowledge without altering the LLMs' parameters. Our PKG is based on open-source "white-box" language models, allowing offline memory of any knowledge that LLMs require. We demonstrate that our PKG framework can enhance the performance of "black-box" LLMs on a range of domain knowledge-intensive tasks that require factual (+7.9%), tabular (+11.9%), medical (+3.0%), and multimodal (+8.1%) knowledge.

Despite the dominance and effectiveness of scaling, resulting in large networks with hundreds of billions of parameters, the necessity to train overparametrized models remains poorly understood, and alternative approaches do not necessarily make it cheaper to train high-performance models. In this paper, we explore low-rank training techniques as an alternative approach to training large neural networks. We introduce a novel method called ReLoRA, which utilizes low-rank updates to train high-rank networks. We apply ReLoRA to pre-training transformer language models with up to 350M parameters and demonstrate comparable performance to regular neural network training. Furthermore, we observe that the efficiency of ReLoRA increases with model size, making it a promising approach for training multi-billion-parameter networks efficiently. Our findings shed light on the potential of low-rank training techniques and their implications for scaling laws.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling multilingual machine translation (MMT). In this paper, we systematically investigate the advantages and challenges of LLMs for MMT by answering two questions: 1) How well do LLMs perform in translating a massive number of languages? 2) Which factors affect LLMs' performance in translation? We evaluate popular LLMs, including XGLM, OPT, BLOOMZ, and ChatGPT, on 102 languages. Our empirical results show that even the best model ChatGPT still lags behind the supervised baseline NLLB in 83.33% of translation directions. Through further analysis, we discover that LLMs exhibit new working patterns when used for MMT. First, prompt semantics can surprisingly be ignored when given in-context exemplars, where LLMs still show strong performance even with unreasonable prompts. Second, cross-lingual exemplars can provide better task instruction for low-resource translation than exemplars in the same language pairs. Third, we observe the overestimated performance of BLOOMZ on dataset Flores-101, indicating the potential risk when using public datasets for evaluation.