Tiny Aya redefines what a small multilingual language model can achieve. Trained on 70 languages and refined through region-aware posttraining, it delivers state-of-the-art in translation quality, strong multilingual understanding, and high-quality target-language generation, all with just 3.35B parameters. The release includes a pretrained foundation model, a globally balanced instruction-tuned variant, and three region-specialized models targeting languages from Africa, South Asia, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and West Asia. This report details the training strategy, data composition, and comprehensive evaluation framework behind Tiny Aya, and presents an alternative scaling path for multilingual AI: one centered on efficiency, balanced performance across languages, and practical deployment.
@article{arxiv.2603.11510,
title = {Tiny Aya: Bridging Scale and Multilingual Depth},
author = {Alejandro R. Salamanca and Diana Abagyan and Daniel D'souza and Ammar Khairi and David Mora and Saurabh Dash and Viraat Aryabumi and Sara Rajaee and Mehrnaz Mofakhami and Ananya Sahu and Thomas Euyang and Brittawnya Prince and Madeline Smith and Hangyu Lin and Acyr Locatelli and Sara Hooker and Tom Kocmi and Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang and Phil Blunsom and Nick Frosst and Joelle Pineau and Beyza Ermis and Ahmet Üstün and Julia Kreutzer and Marzieh Fadaee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.11510},
year = {2026}
}