Related papers: Grow Up and Merge: Scaling Strategies for Efficien…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain heavily centered on English, with limited performance in low-resource languages. Existing adaptation approaches, such as continual pre-training, demand significant computational resources. In the case of…

Adapting general-purpose language models to new skills is currently an expensive process that must be repeated as new instruction datasets targeting new skills are created, or can cause the models to forget older skills. In this work, we…

With multilingual machine translation (MMT) models continuing to grow in size and number of supported languages, it is natural to reuse and upgrade existing models to save computation as data becomes available in more languages. However,…

Large language models (LLMs) still struggle across tasks outside of high-resource languages. In this work, we investigate cross-lingual transfer to lower-resource languages where task-specific post-training data is scarce. Building on prior…

Fine-tuning a task-specific multilingual large language model (LLM) involves training the model on a multilingual dataset with examples in all the required languages. Updating one or more supported languages with additional data or adding…

Reusing pretrained base models for further pretraining, such as continual pretraining or model growth, is promising at reducing the cost of training language models from scratch. However, the effectiveness remains unclear, especially when…

Model merging has emerged as a promising technique for enhancing large language models, though its application in large-scale pre-training remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation of model…

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In…

As language models scale, the amount of data they require grows -- yet many target data sources, such as low-resource languages or specialized domains, are inherently limited in size. A common strategy is to mix this scarce but valuable…

Recent large language models (LLM) exhibit sub-optimal performance on low-resource languages, as the training data of these models is usually dominated by English and other high-resource languages. Furthermore, it is challenging to train…

Model merging, such as model souping, is the practice of combining different models with the same architecture together without further training. In this work, we present a model merging methodology that addresses the difficulty of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been adopted and deployed worldwide for a broad variety of applications. However, ensuring their safe use remains a significant challenge. Preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms…

In this work, we provide a large-scale empirical study of the scaling properties of multilingual neural machine translation models. We examine how increases in the model size affect the model performance and investigate the role of the…

Endowing models with consistent multilingual performance can be achieved by mixing pre-training data, or post-training approaches such as language-specific model merging. In this work, we test whether merging can be applied to monolingually…

Expanding Large Language Models~(LLMs) to new languages is a costly endeavor, demanding extensive Continued Pre-Training~(CPT) and data-intensive alignment. While recent data-free merging techniques attempt to bypass alignment by fusing a…

Large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for global enterprise applications due to substantial performance gaps between high-resource and mid/low-resource languages, driven by English-centric pretraining and internal reasoning biases.…

In recent years, language models have drastically grown in size, and the abilities of these models have been shown to improve with scale. The majority of recent scaling laws studies focused on high-compute high-parameter count settings,…

We propose a novel scaling law for general-purpose decoder-only language models (LMs) trained on multilingual data, tackling the problem of balancing languages during multilingual pretraining. A primary challenge in studying multilingual…

Pretraining large language models (LLMs) is resource-intensive, often requiring months of training time even with high-end GPU clusters. There are two approaches of mitigating such computational demands: reusing smaller models to train…