new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Sep 18

Measuring Language Transfer in Robot Policies: Adding Greek to a Cosmos3 Vision-Language-Action Policy

Robot foundation models are trained and evaluated predominantly in English, and robot demonstration corpora do not exist for most languages. We study the addition of Greek to an open vision-language-action stack using only machine-rephrased instructions and no architecture changes. The main challenge is measurement rather than translation. Several plausible instruments produce false conclusions: a color-histogram metric rewards noise, a single-goal benchmark scores 84.6% under correct Greek and 82.6% under deliberately wrong instructions, training loss fails to predict Greek success, and single-run comparisons are dominated by seed variation. On a discriminative ninety-task suite with three seeds per arm, a multilingual text tower without Greek demonstrations remains at its wrong-instruction floor, while Greek-only training exceeds its control by at most 2.7 points. Bilingual training yields a consistent 6.7-7.1 point margin over its control and reaches about two fifths of English performance. The policy also overfits the translator's phrasing; training on seven phrasings per task approximately halves this penalty. Warm-starting from a language-adapted world model and unfreezing the text tower both degrade performance. The results support two practical requirements for low-resource robot-policy localization: build a guaranteed null before trusting a metric, and replicate low-resource-language results across seeds.

KIEFERSA KIEFER
·
Sep 6 2

ISCSLP 2026 CoT-TTS Challenge: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Context-Aware Text-to-Speech

Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) have greatly improved speech naturalness, speaker similarity, and controllability. However, most existing controllable TTS systems still rely on explicit user-provided style prompts, making it difficult to automatically determine how a sentence should be spoken in long and complex conversational scenarios. This proposal introduces the ISCSLP 2026 CoT-TTS Challenge, which aims to evaluate whether a system can infer the intended speaking manner from contextual information and generate speech consistent with both the reasoning output and the surrounding scene. The challenge contains two tracks: text-context-aware CoT-TTS and audio-context-aware CoT-TTS. We construct a large-scale bilingual training set from speech-rich media and provide carefully filtered evaluation data for leaderboard comparison. Each system is required to output both a chain-of-thought reasoning analysis and the generated speech waveform. The official evaluation combines objective metrics, multimodal LLM-based evaluation, and human subjective assessment. To facilitate reproducibility, we provide inference code together with a fine-tuning recipe for a 0.6B Qwen3-based model trained via a three-stage strategy. This challenge is expected to support research on context understanding, chain-of-thought reasoning, and expressive speech generation for applications such as film dubbing, audiobook production, virtual characters, and spoken dialogue agents. Further information about the associated challenge is available at:https://iscslp2026-cot-tts.github.io/challenge-website/

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 19

The Role of Language Imbalance in Cross-lingual Generalisation: Insights from Cloned Language Experiments

Multilinguality is crucial for extending recent advancements in language modelling to diverse linguistic communities. To maintain high performance while representing multiple languages, multilingual models ideally align representations, allowing what is learned in one language to generalise to others. Prior research has emphasised the importance of parallel data and shared vocabulary elements as key factors for such alignment. In this study, we investigate an unintuitive novel driver of cross-lingual generalisation: language imbalance. In controlled experiments on perfectly equivalent cloned languages, we observe that the existence of a predominant language during training boosts the performance of less frequent languages and leads to stronger alignment of model representations across languages. Furthermore, we find that this trend is amplified with scale: with large enough models or long enough training, we observe that bilingual training data with a 90/10 language split yields better performance on both languages than a balanced 50/50 split. Building on these insights, we design training schemes that can improve performance in all cloned languages, even without altering the training data. As we extend our analysis to real languages, we find that infrequent languages still benefit from frequent ones, yet whether language imbalance causes cross-lingual generalisation there is not conclusive.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 11, 2024

Perturbation Probing: A Two-Pass-per-Prompt Diagnostic for FFN Behavioral Circuits in Aligned LLMs

Perturbation probing generates task-specific causal hypotheses for FFN neurons in large language models using two forward passes per prompt and no backpropagation, followed by a one-time intervention sweep of about 150 passes amortized across all identified neurons. Across eight behavioral circuits, 13 models, and four architecture families, we identify two circuit structures that organize LLM behavior. Opposition circuits appear when RLHF suppresses a pre-training tendency. In safety refusal, about 50 neurons, or 0.014 percent of all neurons, control the refusal template; ablating them changes 80 percent of response formats on 520 AdvBench prompts while producing near-zero harmful compliance, 3 of 520 cases, all with disclaimers. Routing circuits appear for pre-training behaviors distributed through attention. For language selection, residual-stream direction injection switches English to Chinese output on 99.1 percent of 580 benchmark prompts in the 3 of 19 tested models that satisfy three observed conditions: bilingual training, FFN-to-skip signal ratio between 0.3 and 1.1, and linear representability. The same intervention fails on the other 16 models and on math, code, and factual circuits, defining the limits of directional steering. The FFN-to-skip signal ratio, computed from the same two forward passes, distinguishes the two structures and predicts the appropriate intervention. Circuit topology varies by architecture, from Qwen's concentrated FFN bottleneck to Gemma's normalization-shielded circuit. In Qwen3.5-2B, ablating 20 neurons eliminates multi-turn sycophantic capitulation, while amplifying 10 related neurons improves factual correction from 52 percent to 88 percent on 200 TruthfulQA prompts. These results show that perturbation probing offers mechanistic insight into RLHF-organized behavior and a practical toolkit for precision template-layer editing.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 29

From Traditional Taggers to LLMs: A Comparative Study of POS Tagging for Medieval Romance Languages

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging for Medieval Romance languages remains challenging due to orthographic variation, morphological complexity, and limited annotated resources. This paper presents a systematic empirical evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for POS tagging across three medieval varieties: Medieval Occitan, Medieval Catalan, and Medieval French. We compare traditional rule-based and statistical taggers with modern open-source LLMs under zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, monolingual fine-tuning, and cross-lingual transfer learning settings. Experiments on historically grounded datasets show that LLM-based approaches consistently outperform traditional taggers, with fine-tuning and multilingual training yielding the largest improvements. In particular, cross-lingual transfer learning substantially benefits under-resourced varieties, while targeted bilingual training can outperform broader multilingual configurations for specific target languages. The results highlight the importance of linguistic proximity and dataset characteristics when designing transfer strategies for historical NLP. These findings provide empirical insights into the applicability of modern neural methods to medieval text processing and provide practical guidance for deploying LLM-based POS tagging pipelines in digital humanities research. All code, models, and processed datasets are released for reproducibility.

  • 2 authors
·
May 8

CCI4.0: A Bilingual Pretraining Dataset for Enhancing Reasoning in Large Language Models

We introduce CCI4.0, a large-scale bilingual pre-training dataset engineered for superior data quality and diverse human-like reasoning trajectory. CCI4.0 occupies roughly 35 TB of disk space and comprises two sub-datasets: CCI4.0-M2-Base and CCI4.0-M2-CoT. CCI4.0-M2-Base combines a 5.2 TB carefully curated Chinese web corpus, a 22.5 TB English subset from Nemotron-CC, and diverse sources from math, wiki, arxiv, and code. Although these data are mostly sourced from well-processed datasets, the quality standards of various domains are dynamic and require extensive expert experience and labor to process. So, we propose a novel pipeline justifying data quality mainly based on models through two-stage deduplication, multiclassifier quality scoring, and domain-aware fluency filtering. We extract 4.5 billion pieces of CoT(Chain-of-Thought) templates, named CCI4.0-M2-CoT. Differing from the distillation of CoT from larger models, our proposed staged CoT extraction exemplifies diverse reasoning patterns and significantly decreases the possibility of hallucination. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that LLMs pre-trained in CCI4.0 benefit from cleaner, more reliable training signals, yielding consistent improvements in downstream tasks, especially in math and code reflection tasks. Our results underscore the critical role of rigorous data curation and human thinking templates in advancing LLM performance, shedding some light on automatically processing pretraining corpora.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 9, 2025 2

Taiyi-Diffusion-XL: Advancing Bilingual Text-to-Image Generation with Large Vision-Language Model Support

Recent advancements in text-to-image models have significantly enhanced image generation capabilities, yet a notable gap of open-source models persists in bilingual or Chinese language support. To address this need, we present Taiyi-Diffusion-XL, a new Chinese and English bilingual text-to-image model which is developed by extending the capabilities of CLIP and Stable-Diffusion-XL through a process of bilingual continuous pre-training. This approach includes the efficient expansion of vocabulary by integrating the most frequently used Chinese characters into CLIP's tokenizer and embedding layers, coupled with an absolute position encoding expansion. Additionally, we enrich text prompts by large vision-language model, leading to better images captions and possess higher visual quality. These enhancements are subsequently applied to downstream text-to-image models. Our empirical results indicate that the developed CLIP model excels in bilingual image-text retrieval.Furthermore, the bilingual image generation capabilities of Taiyi-Diffusion-XL surpass previous models. This research leads to the development and open-sourcing of the Taiyi-Diffusion-XL model, representing a notable advancement in the field of image generation, particularly for Chinese language applications. This contribution is a step forward in addressing the need for more diverse language support in multimodal research. The model and demonstration are made publicly available at https://huggingface.co/IDEA-CCNL/Taiyi-Stable-Diffusion-XL-3.5B/{this https URL}, fostering further research and collaboration in this domain.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 26, 2024 2

Vega-MT: The JD Explore Academy Translation System for WMT22

We describe the JD Explore Academy's submission of the WMT 2022 shared general translation task. We participated in all high-resource tracks and one medium-resource track, including Chinese-English, German-English, Czech-English, Russian-English, and Japanese-English. We push the limit of our previous work -- bidirectional training for translation by scaling up two main factors, i.e. language pairs and model sizes, namely the Vega-MT system. As for language pairs, we scale the "bidirectional" up to the "multidirectional" settings, covering all participating languages, to exploit the common knowledge across languages, and transfer them to the downstream bilingual tasks. As for model sizes, we scale the Transformer-Big up to the extremely large model that owns nearly 4.7 Billion parameters, to fully enhance the model capacity for our Vega-MT. Also, we adopt the data augmentation strategies, e.g. cycle translation for monolingual data, and bidirectional self-training for bilingual and monolingual data, to comprehensively exploit the bilingual and monolingual data. To adapt our Vega-MT to the general domain test set, generalization tuning is designed. Based on the official automatic scores of constrained systems, in terms of the sacreBLEU shown in Figure-1, we got the 1st place on {Zh-En (33.5), En-Zh (49.7), De-En (33.7), En-De (37.8), Cs-En (54.9), En-Cs (41.4) and En-Ru (32.7)}, 2nd place on {Ru-En (45.1) and Ja-En (25.6)}, and 3rd place on {En-Ja(41.5)}, respectively; W.R.T the COMET, we got the 1st place on {Zh-En (45.1), En-Zh (61.7), De-En (58.0), En-De (63.2), Cs-En (74.7), Ru-En (64.9), En-Ru (69.6) and En-Ja (65.1)}, 2nd place on {En-Cs (95.3) and Ja-En (40.6)}, respectively.

  • 12 authors
·
Sep 19, 2022

Progressive Training for Explainable Citation-Grounded Dialogue: Reducing Hallucination to Zero in English-Hindi LLMs

Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems aim to generate informative, contextually relevant responses by conditioning on external knowledge sources. However, most existing approaches focus exclusively on English, lack explicit citation mechanisms for verifying factual claims, and offer limited transparency into model decision-making. We present XKD-Dial, a progressive four-stage training pipeline for explainable, knowledge-grounded dialogue generation in a bilingual (English-Hindi) setting, comprising: (1) multilingual adaptation, (2) English dialogue SFT with citation grounding, (3) bilingual dialogue SFT, and (4) GRPO alignment with citation-aware rewards. We evaluate six models spanning encoder-decoder (250M-3B) and decoder-only (1B-7B) architectures at every pipeline stage. Our key contributions are: (i) three post-hoc explainability analyses - cross-attention alignment, Integrated Gradients attribution, and occlusion-based causal grounding - applied systematically across the training trajectory to reveal how citation behaviour is learned, not only whether it is learned; (ii) citation-grounded SFT reduces hallucination to 0.0% for encoder-decoder models from Stage 2 onward; (iii) the progressive pipeline prevents catastrophic forgetting while improving Hindi capabilities; (iv) smaller models match larger models on English after SFT; and (v) GRPO provides marginal improvement over well-designed SFT for structured citation tasks. We evaluate across six automatic metrics (BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore, FactScore, Citation-F1, and hallucination rate).

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 19 2

Arkios: An Open Bilingual English-Nepali Language Model Trained From Scratch, with a Devanagari-Aware Tokenizer

We present Arkios, a 1.04B-parameter dense transformer pretrained from scratch on 150B tokens of bilingual English-Nepali text, using a custom single-file C/CUDA training stack and a Devanagari-aware byte-level BPE tokenizer built for this project. On ARC-Easy and ARC-Challenge, Arkios exceeds three comparably sized open models (Pythia-1.4B, TinyLlama-1.1B, OLMo-1B) despite an order of magnitude fewer training tokens, likely aided by a match between our educational-web-text pretraining data and ARC's grade-school-science format rather than a general capability advantage. We report full evaluation results under standard protocols, including a correction to an earlier partial-sample estimate, and findings specific to evaluating small models in a low-resource language: the standard multiple-choice-letter prompt format used by common evaluation harnesses places this model at chance on Nepali reading comprehension, and simultaneously at chance on English in the same format, which would lead a naive benchmark run to conclude the model has no Nepali ability when in fact it does. Concretely, both languages score at chance in the letter-choice format (0.240 Nepali, 0.236 English, against a chance baseline of 0.250), while scoring the answer text directly reveals genuine, English-favoring comprehension (0.306 Nepali, 0.387 English). We describe a manifest-conditioned tool-use contract introduced during instruction tuning, where tool calls are permitted only when a tool manifest is declared in context and suppressed otherwise, and report where that contract holds and where it does not. We release both the base and instruction-tuned model weights under Apache-2.0. The training code and a small privately-sourced portion of the Nepali pretraining corpus are not released; everything needed to reproduce the reported numbers from the released weights is included here.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 29

Bailong: Bilingual Transfer Learning based on QLoRA and Zip-tie Embedding

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in various NLP applications. However, the majority of existing open-source LLMs are pre-trained primarily on English data and little part of other languages. This deficiency in multilingual training data results in suboptimal performance when applied to languages with fewer available resources. Furthermore, enhancing the performance of LLMs on low-resource languages by full-parameter fine-tuning with additional data requires substantial computational resources, posing computational barriers for research organizations and individual researchers. Consequently, several techniques such as parameter-efficient tuning and advanced embedding initialization have been proposed to address these challenges. In this work, we combine them to facilitate cross-lingual transfer on English-dominated open-source LLM. To effectively enhance the model's proficiency in Traditional Chinese, we conduct secondary pre-training on Llama 2 7B with Traditional Chinese data by leveraging QLoRA and our proposed zip-tie embedding initialization. The resulting model called Bailong, which stands for Bilingual trAnsfer learnIng based on qLOra and zip-tie embeddiNG. We present Bailong-instruct 7B, a fine-tuned version of Bailong 7B optimized for multi-turn dialogue scenarios. Recognizing the inadequacy of benchmark datasets in Traditional Chinese, we further introduce Bailong-bench to assess the alignment of models with human preferences and the capability to follow instructions in both Traditional Chinese and English tasks. In our evaluation, Bailong-instruct 7B exhibits competitive performance on Bailong-bench and other benchmark datasets when compared to other open-source models of similar or even larger parameter sizes. Bailong-instruct 7B and Bailong-bench are publicly available with the aim of empowering the community to build upon our efforts.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 31, 2024

MindLLM: Pre-training Lightweight Large Language Model from Scratch, Evaluations and Domain Applications

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language tasks, marking significant strides towards general artificial intelligence. While general artificial intelligence is leveraged by developing increasingly large-scale models, there could be another branch to develop lightweight custom models that better serve certain domains, taking into account the high cost of training and deploying LLMs and the scarcity of resources. In this paper, we present MindLLM, a novel series of bilingual lightweight large language models, trained from scratch, alleviating such burdens by offering models with 1.3 billion and 3 billion parameters. A thorough account of experiences accrued during large model development is given, covering every step of the process, including data construction, model architecture, evaluation, and applications. Such insights are hopefully valuable for fellow academics and developers. MindLLM consistently matches or surpasses the performance of other open-source larger models on some public benchmarks. We also introduce an innovative instruction tuning framework tailored for smaller models to enhance their capabilities efficiently. Moreover, we explore the application of MindLLM in specific vertical domains such as law and finance, underscoring the agility and adaptability of our lightweight models.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 24, 2023 1

AquilaMoE: Efficient Training for MoE Models with Scale-Up and Scale-Out Strategies

In recent years, with the rapid application of large language models across various fields, the scale of these models has gradually increased, and the resources required for their pre-training have grown exponentially. Training an LLM from scratch will cost a lot of computation resources while scaling up from a smaller model is a more efficient approach and has thus attracted significant attention. In this paper, we present AquilaMoE, a cutting-edge bilingual 8*16B Mixture of Experts (MoE) language model that has 8 experts with 16 billion parameters each and is developed using an innovative training methodology called EfficientScale. This approach optimizes performance while minimizing data requirements through a two-stage process. The first stage, termed Scale-Up, initializes the larger model with weights from a pre-trained smaller model, enabling substantial knowledge transfer and continuous pretraining with significantly less data. The second stage, Scale-Out, uses a pre-trained dense model to initialize the MoE experts, further enhancing knowledge transfer and performance. Extensive validation experiments on 1.8B and 7B models compared various initialization schemes, achieving models that maintain and reduce loss during continuous pretraining. Utilizing the optimal scheme, we successfully trained a 16B model and subsequently the 8*16B AquilaMoE model, demonstrating significant improvements in performance and training efficiency.

  • 27 authors
·
Aug 12, 2024 1

Interpretable Bilingual Multimodal Large Language Model for Diverse Biomedical Tasks

Several medical Multimodal Large Languange Models (MLLMs) have been developed to address tasks involving visual images with textual instructions across various medical modalities, achieving impressive results. Most current medical generalist models are region-agnostic, treating the entire image as a holistic representation. However, they struggle to identify which specific regions they are focusing on when generating a sentence. To mimic the behavior of doctors, who typically begin by reviewing the entire image before concentrating on specific regions for a thorough evaluation, we aim to enhance the capability of medical MLLMs in understanding anatomical regions within entire medical scans. To achieve it, we first formulate Region-Centric tasks and construct a large-scale dataset, MedRegInstruct, to incorporate regional information into training. Combining our collected dataset with other medical multimodal corpora for training, we propose a Region-Aware medical MLLM, MedRegA, which is the first bilingual generalist medical AI system to simultaneously handle image-level and region-level medical vision-language tasks across a broad range of modalities. Our MedRegA not only enables three region-centric tasks, but also achieves the best performance for visual question answering, report generation and medical image classification over 8 modalities, showcasing significant versatility. Experiments demonstrate that our model can not only accomplish powerful performance across various medical vision-language tasks in bilingual settings, but also recognize and detect structures in multimodal medical scans, boosting the interpretability and user interactivity of medical MLLMs. Our project page is https://medrega.github.io.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 23, 2024

Seedream 2.0: A Native Chinese-English Bilingual Image Generation Foundation Model

Rapid advancement of diffusion models has catalyzed remarkable progress in the field of image generation. However, prevalent models such as Flux, SD3.5 and Midjourney, still grapple with issues like model bias, limited text rendering capabilities, and insufficient understanding of Chinese cultural nuances. To address these limitations, we present Seedream 2.0, a native Chinese-English bilingual image generation foundation model that excels across diverse dimensions, which adeptly manages text prompt in both Chinese and English, supporting bilingual image generation and text rendering. We develop a powerful data system that facilitates knowledge integration, and a caption system that balances the accuracy and richness for image description. Particularly, Seedream is integrated with a self-developed bilingual large language model as a text encoder, allowing it to learn native knowledge directly from massive data. This enable it to generate high-fidelity images with accurate cultural nuances and aesthetic expressions described in either Chinese or English. Beside, Glyph-Aligned ByT5 is applied for flexible character-level text rendering, while a Scaled ROPE generalizes well to untrained resolutions. Multi-phase post-training optimizations, including SFT and RLHF iterations, further improve the overall capability. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Seedream 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple aspects, including prompt-following, aesthetics, text rendering, and structural correctness. Furthermore, Seedream 2.0 has been optimized through multiple RLHF iterations to closely align its output with human preferences, as revealed by its outstanding ELO score. In addition, it can be readily adapted to an instruction-based image editing model, such as SeedEdit, with strong editing capability that balances instruction-following and image consistency.

  • 28 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025 3

Tatarstan Toponyms: A Bilingual Dataset and Hybrid RAG System for Geospatial Question Answering

This paper addresses automatic geospatial question answering over multilingual toponymic data. An original bilingual dataset of toponyms of the Republic of Tatarstan is introduced, comprising 9,688 structured records with linguistic, etymological, administrative, and coordinate information (93.1% georeferenced). Based on this dataset, a question-answering corpus of approximately 39,000 question-context-answer triples is constructed with guaranteed answer localization. A hybrid retriever integrates dense semantic indexing (multilingual-e5-large) with geospatial filtering via KD-trees and haversine distance. On 500 test queries, the hybrid search achieves Recall@1=0.988, Recall@5=1.000, and MRR=0.994, significantly outperforming BM25 and purely spatial methods. Among tested reader architectures (RuBERT, XLM-RoBERTa-large, T5-RUS), XLM-RoBERTa-large attains the best quality: EM=0.992, F1=0.994. On raw outputs, RuBERT models fail on coordinate questions (F1=0) while XLM-RoBERTa-large reaches F1=0.984; however, simple post-processing eliminates numerical gaps and restores RuBERT accuracy to 100%. This discrepancy stems from tokenization differences and pre-training corpora composition. All resources (dataset, QA corpus, model weights, web demo) are openly published on Hugging Face. Results apply to geospatial QA services, geocoding, and digital humanities in multilingual regions.

  • 1 authors
·
May 6

Verifiable Fine-Tuning for LLMs: Zero-Knowledge Training Proofs Bound to Data Provenance and Policy

Large language models are often adapted through parameter efficient fine tuning, but current release practices provide weak assurances about what data were used and how updates were computed. We present Verifiable Fine Tuning, a protocol and system that produces succinct zero knowledge proofs that a released model was obtained from a public initialization under a declared training program and an auditable dataset commitment. The approach combines five elements. First, commitments that bind data sources, preprocessing, licenses, and per epoch quota counters to a manifest. Second, a verifiable sampler that supports public replayable and private index hiding batch selection. Third, update circuits restricted to parameter efficient fine tuning that enforce AdamW style optimizer semantics and proof friendly approximations with explicit error budgets. Fourth, recursive aggregation that folds per step proofs into per epoch and end to end certificates with millisecond verification. Fifth, provenance binding and optional trusted execution property cards that attest code identity and constants. On English and bilingual instruction mixtures, the method maintains utility within tight budgets while achieving practical proof performance. Policy quotas are enforced with zero violations, and private sampling windows show no measurable index leakage. Federated experiments demonstrate that the system composes with probabilistic audits and bandwidth constraints. These results indicate that end to end verifiable fine tuning is feasible today for real parameter efficient pipelines, closing a critical trust gap for regulated and decentralized deployments.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 28, 2025

GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model

We introduce GLM-130B, a bilingual (English and Chinese) pre-trained language model with 130 billion parameters. It is an attempt to open-source a 100B-scale model at least as good as GPT-3 and unveil how models of such a scale can be successfully pre-trained. Over the course of this effort, we face numerous unexpected technical and engineering challenges, particularly on loss spikes and disconvergence. In this paper, we introduce the training process of GLM-130B including its design choices, training strategies for both efficiency and stability, and engineering efforts. The resultant GLM-130B model offers significant outperformance over GPT-3 175B on a wide range of popular English benchmarks while the performance advantage is not observed in OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B. It also consistently and significantly outperforms ERNIE TITAN 3.0 260B -- the largest Chinese language model -- across related benchmarks. Finally, we leverage a unique scaling property of GLM-130B to reach INT4 quantization, without quantization aware training and with almost no performance loss, making it the first among 100B-scale models. More importantly, the property allows its effective inference on 4timesRTX 3090 (24G) or 8timesRTX 2080 Ti (11G) GPUs, the most ever affordable GPUs required for using 100B-scale models. The GLM-130B model weights are publicly accessible and its code, training logs, related toolkit, and lessons learned are open-sourced at https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-130B .

  • 18 authors
·
Oct 5, 2022 1

TextHawk2: A Large Vision-Language Model Excels in Bilingual OCR and Grounding with 16x Fewer Tokens

Reading dense text and locating objects within images are fundamental abilities for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) tasked with advanced jobs. Previous LVLMs, including superior proprietary models like GPT-4o, have struggled to excel in both tasks simultaneously. Moreover, previous LVLMs with fine-grained perception cost thousands of tokens per image, making them resource-intensive. We present TextHawk2, a bilingual LVLM featuring efficient fine-grained perception and demonstrating cutting-edge performance across general-purpose, OCR, and grounding tasks with 16 times fewer image tokens. Critical improvements include: (1) Token Compression: Building on the efficient architecture of its predecessor, TextHawk2 significantly reduces the number of tokens per image by 16 times, facilitating training and deployment of the TextHawk series with minimal resources. (2) Visual Encoder Reinforcement: We enhance the visual encoder through LVLM co-training, unlocking its potential for previously unseen tasks like Chinese OCR and grounding. (3) Data Diversity: We maintain a comparable scale of 100 million samples while diversifying the sources of pre-training data. We assess TextHawk2 across multiple benchmarks, where it consistently delivers superior performance and outperforms closed-source models of similar scale, such as achieving 78.4% accuracy on OCRBench, 81.4% accuracy on ChartQA, 89.6% ANLS on DocVQA, and 88.1% accuracy@0.5 on RefCOCOg-test.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024

Emotion-Qwen: Training Hybrid Experts for Unified Emotion and General Vision-Language Understanding

Emotion understanding in videos aims to accurately recognize and interpret individuals' emotional states by integrating contextual, visual, textual, and auditory cues. While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated significant progress in general vision-language (VL) tasks, their performance in emotion-specific scenarios remains limited. Moreover, fine-tuning LMMs on emotion-related tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, hindering their ability to generalize across diverse tasks. To address these challenges, we present Emotion-Qwen, a tailored multimodal framework designed to enhance both emotion understanding and general VL reasoning. Emotion-Qwen incorporates a sophisticated Hybrid Compressor based on the Mixture of Experts (MoE) paradigm, which dynamically routes inputs to balance emotion-specific and general-purpose processing. The model is pre-trained in a three-stage pipeline on large-scale general and emotional image datasets to support robust multimodal representations. Furthermore, we construct the Video Emotion Reasoning (VER) dataset, comprising more than 40K bilingual video clips with fine-grained descriptive annotations, to further enrich Emotion-Qwen's emotional reasoning capability. Experimental results demonstrate that Emotion-Qwen achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple emotion recognition benchmarks, while maintaining competitive results on general VL tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/24DavidHuang/Emotion-Qwen.

  • 10 authors
·
May 10, 2025

JiraiBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models' Detection of Human Self-Destructive Behavior Content in Jirai Community

This paper introduces JiraiBench, the first bilingual benchmark for evaluating large language models' effectiveness in detecting self-destructive content across Chinese and Japanese social media communities. Focusing on the transnational "Jirai" (landmine) online subculture that encompasses multiple forms of self-destructive behaviors including drug overdose, eating disorders, and self-harm, we present a comprehensive evaluation framework incorporating both linguistic and cultural dimensions. Our dataset comprises 10,419 Chinese posts and 5,000 Japanese posts with multidimensional annotation along three behavioral categories, achieving substantial inter-annotator agreement. Experimental evaluations across four state-of-the-art models reveal significant performance variations based on instructional language, with Japanese prompts unexpectedly outperforming Chinese prompts when processing Chinese content. This emergent cross-cultural transfer suggests that cultural proximity can sometimes outweigh linguistic similarity in detection tasks. Cross-lingual transfer experiments with fine-tuned models further demonstrate the potential for knowledge transfer between these language systems without explicit target language training. These findings highlight the need for culturally-informed approaches to multilingual content moderation and provide empirical evidence for the importance of cultural context in developing more effective detection systems for vulnerable online communities.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 27, 2025

Ziya-VL: Bilingual Large Vision-Language Model via Multi-Task Instruction Tuning

Recent advancements enlarge the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot image-to-text generation and understanding by integrating multi-modal inputs. However, such success is typically limited to English scenarios due to the lack of large-scale and high-quality non-English multi-modal resources, making it extremely difficult to establish competitive counterparts in other languages. In this paper, we introduce the Ziya-VL series, a set of bilingual large-scale vision-language models (LVLMs) designed to incorporate visual semantics into LLM for multi-modal dialogue. Composed of Ziya-VL-Base and Ziya-VL-Chat, our models adopt the Querying Transformer from BLIP-2, further exploring the assistance of optimization schemes such as instruction tuning, multi-stage training and low-rank adaptation module for visual-language alignment. In addition, we stimulate the understanding ability of GPT-4 in multi-modal scenarios, translating our gathered English image-text datasets into Chinese and generating instruction-response through the in-context learning method. The experiment results demonstrate that compared to the existing LVLMs, Ziya-VL achieves competitive performance across a wide range of English-only tasks including zero-shot image-text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering. The evaluation leaderboard accessed by GPT-4 also indicates that our models possess satisfactory image-text understanding and generation capabilities in Chinese multi-modal scenario dialogues. Code, demo and models are available at ~https://huggingface.co/IDEA-CCNL/Ziya-BLIP2-14B-Visual-v1.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 12, 2023

M2-Encoder: Advancing Bilingual Image-Text Understanding by Large-scale Efficient Pretraining

Vision-language foundation models like CLIP have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, VLM models supporting multi-language, e.g., in both Chinese and English, have lagged due to the relative scarcity of large-scale pretraining datasets. Toward this end, we introduce a comprehensive bilingual (Chinese-English) dataset BM-6B with over 6 billion image-text pairs, aimed at enhancing multimodal foundation models to well understand images in both languages. To handle such a scale of dataset, we propose a novel grouped aggregation approach for image-text contrastive loss computation, which reduces the communication overhead and GPU memory demands significantly, facilitating a 60% increase in training speed. We pretrain a series of bilingual image-text foundation models with an enhanced fine-grained understanding ability on BM-6B, the resulting models, dubbed as M^2-Encoders (pronounced "M-Square"), set new benchmarks in both languages for multimodal retrieval and classification tasks. Notably, Our largest M^2-Encoder-10B model has achieved top-1 accuracies of 88.5% on ImageNet and 80.7% on ImageNet-CN under a zero-shot classification setting, surpassing previously reported SoTA methods by 2.2% and 21.1%, respectively. The M^2-Encoder series represents one of the most comprehensive bilingual image-text foundation models to date, so we are making it available to the research community for further exploration and development.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024

GPipe: Efficient Training of Giant Neural Networks using Pipeline Parallelism

Scaling up deep neural network capacity has been known as an effective approach to improving model quality for several different machine learning tasks. In many cases, increasing model capacity beyond the memory limit of a single accelerator has required developing special algorithms or infrastructure. These solutions are often architecture-specific and do not transfer to other tasks. To address the need for efficient and task-independent model parallelism, we introduce GPipe, a pipeline parallelism library that allows scaling any network that can be expressed as a sequence of layers. By pipelining different sub-sequences of layers on separate accelerators, GPipe provides the flexibility of scaling a variety of different networks to gigantic sizes efficiently. Moreover, GPipe utilizes a novel batch-splitting pipelining algorithm, resulting in almost linear speedup when a model is partitioned across multiple accelerators. We demonstrate the advantages of GPipe by training large-scale neural networks on two different tasks with distinct network architectures: (i) Image Classification: We train a 557-million-parameter AmoebaNet model and attain a top-1 accuracy of 84.4% on ImageNet-2012, (ii) Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: We train a single 6-billion-parameter, 128-layer Transformer model on a corpus spanning over 100 languages and achieve better quality than all bilingual models.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 16, 2018

Golden Touchstone: A Comprehensive Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Financial Large Language Models

As large language models become increasingly prevalent in the financial sector, there is a pressing need for a standardized method to comprehensively assess their performance. However, existing finance benchmarks often suffer from limited language and task coverage, as well as challenges such as low-quality datasets and inadequate adaptability for LLM evaluation. To address these limitations, we propose "Golden Touchstone", the first comprehensive bilingual benchmark for financial LLMs, which incorporates representative datasets from both Chinese and English across eight core financial NLP tasks. Developed from extensive open source data collection and industry-specific demands, this benchmark includes a variety of financial tasks aimed at thoroughly assessing models' language understanding and generation capabilities. Through comparative analysis of major models on the benchmark, such as GPT-4o Llama3, FinGPT and FinMA, we reveal their strengths and limitations in processing complex financial information. Additionally, we open-sourced Touchstone-GPT, a financial LLM trained through continual pre-training and financial instruction tuning, which demonstrates strong performance on the bilingual benchmark but still has limitations in specific tasks.This research not only provides the financial large language models with a practical evaluation tool but also guides the development and optimization of future research. The source code for Golden Touchstone and model weight of Touchstone-GPT have been made publicly available at https://github.com/IDEA-FinAI/Golden-Touchstone, contributing to the ongoing evolution of FinLLMs and fostering further research in this critical area.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 9, 2024 2

A Multi-task Multi-stage Transitional Training Framework for Neural Chat Translation

Neural chat translation (NCT) aims to translate a cross-lingual chat between speakers of different languages. Existing context-aware NMT models cannot achieve satisfactory performances due to the following inherent problems: 1) limited resources of annotated bilingual dialogues; 2) the neglect of modelling conversational properties; 3) training discrepancy between different stages. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a multi-task multi-stage transitional (MMT) training framework, where an NCT model is trained using the bilingual chat translation dataset and additional monolingual dialogues. We elaborately design two auxiliary tasks, namely utterance discrimination and speaker discrimination, to introduce the modelling of dialogue coherence and speaker characteristic into the NCT model. The training process consists of three stages: 1) sentence-level pre-training on large-scale parallel corpus; 2) intermediate training with auxiliary tasks using additional monolingual dialogues; 3) context-aware fine-tuning with gradual transition. Particularly, the second stage serves as an intermediate phase that alleviates the training discrepancy between the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. Moreover, to make the stage transition smoother, we train the NCT model using a gradual transition strategy, i.e., gradually transiting from using monolingual to bilingual dialogues. Extensive experiments on two language pairs demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed training framework.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 27, 2023

TIDES: A Longitudinal Bilingual Dataset for Modeling Multi-Party Social Dynamics

Group conversations are fundamental to human collaboration, yet standard large language models (LLMs) still struggle with the complexities of multi-party interaction. This challenge persists in part because existing group conversation datasets are often limited to short-term lab settings with contrived tasks, failing to capture the long-term social dynamics of real-world teams. To bridge this gap, we introduce TIDES, a high-resolution longitudinal dataset tracking 12 university project teams over a full semester. Comprising 75,971 utterances in both English and Korean from in-person meetings, TIDES provides a naturalistic record of teams working on self-managed projects. Our socio-structural annotations-covering interaction types, emergent roles, and development stages-allow for modeling of team evolution over months. Experiments show that fine-tuning on TIDES improves next-speaker prediction by 13.8 percentage points over a bigram baseline (64.53%) and yields performance comparable to strong proprietary zero-shot models. The model also comes within 2.1 percentage points of the published state of the art on the AMI Meeting Corpus while using approximately 42% less training data. However, human evaluations suggest that better next-speaker prediction does not necessarily yield more natural or coherent utterances, as fine-tuned models were generally less preferred than vanilla models. This potential mismatch motivates further study of how structural modeling can support natural multi-party generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 2

MAP-Neo: Highly Capable and Transparent Bilingual Large Language Model Series

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made great strides in recent years to achieve unprecedented performance across different tasks. However, due to commercial interest, the most competitive models like GPT, Gemini, and Claude have been gated behind proprietary interfaces without disclosing the training details. Recently, many institutions have open-sourced several strong LLMs like LLaMA-3, comparable to existing closed-source LLMs. However, only the model's weights are provided with most details (e.g., intermediate checkpoints, pre-training corpus, and training code, etc.) being undisclosed. To improve the transparency of LLMs, the research community has formed to open-source truly open LLMs (e.g., Pythia, Amber, OLMo), where more details (e.g., pre-training corpus and training code) are being provided. These models have greatly advanced the scientific study of these large models including their strengths, weaknesses, biases and risks. However, we observe that the existing truly open LLMs on reasoning, knowledge, and coding tasks are still inferior to existing state-of-the-art LLMs with similar model sizes. To this end, we open-source MAP-Neo, a highly capable and transparent bilingual language model with 7B parameters trained from scratch on 4.5T high-quality tokens. Our MAP-Neo is the first fully open-sourced bilingual LLM with comparable performance compared to existing state-of-the-art LLMs. Moreover, we open-source all details to reproduce our MAP-Neo, where the cleaned pre-training corpus, data cleaning pipeline, checkpoints, and well-optimized training/evaluation framework are provided. Finally, we hope our MAP-Neo will enhance and strengthen the open research community and inspire more innovations and creativities to facilitate the further improvements of LLMs.

  • 45 authors
·
May 29, 2024 3

RedOne: Revealing Domain-specific LLM Post-Training in Social Networking Services

As a primary medium for modern information dissemination, social networking services (SNS) have experienced rapid growth, which has proposed significant challenges for platform content management and interaction quality improvement. Recently, the development of large language models (LLMs) has offered potential solutions but existing studies focus on isolated tasks, which not only encounter diminishing benefit from the data scaling within individual scenarios but also fail to flexibly adapt to diverse real-world context. To address these challenges, we introduce RedOne, a domain-specific LLM designed to break the performance bottleneck of single-task baselines and establish a comprehensive foundation for the SNS. RedOne was developed through a three-stage training strategy consisting of continue pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization, using a large-scale real-world dataset. Through extensive experiments, RedOne maintains strong general capabilities, and achieves an average improvement up to 14.02% across 8 major SNS tasks and 7.56% in SNS bilingual evaluation benchmark, compared with base models. Furthermore, through online testing, RedOne reduced the exposure rate in harmful content detection by 11.23% and improved the click page rate in post-view search by 14.95% compared with single-tasks finetuned baseline models. These results establish RedOne as a robust domain-specific LLM for SNS, demonstrating excellent generalization across various tasks and promising applicability in real-world scenarios.

  • 25 authors
·
Jul 12, 2025 2

SymbolicLight V1: Spike-Gated Dual-Path Language Modeling with High Activation Sparsity and Sub-Billion-Scale Pre-Training Evidence

Natively trained spiking language models struggle to combine Transformer-like language quality, stable multi-domain pre-training, and high activation sparsity. We present SymbolicLight V1, a spike-gated dual-path language model that combines binary Leaky Integrate-and-Fire spike dynamics with a continuous residual stream. Its Dual-Path SparseTCAM module replaces dense self-attention with an exponential-decay aggregation path for long-range memory and a spike-gated local attention path for short-range precision, complemented by a dynamic context-conditioned decoding head and a bilingual tokenizer. A 194M-parameter SymbolicLight V1 model trained from scratch on a 3B-token Chinese-English corpus reaches held-out validation PPL 8.88-8.93 across four independent runs at >89% per-element activation sparsity. It trails GPT-2 201M by 7.7% in PPL while surpassing GPT-2 124M under the reported comparison. Component ablations at matched 0.5B-token training budgets show that the spike-gated local attention path is the largest contributor, and that replacing LIF dynamics with a deterministic top-k mask at matched sparsity causes a larger degradation, indicating that temporal integration rather than sparsity alone drives performance. We also report a 0.8B-parameter scale-up run trained on 48.8B tokens as evidence of optimization and sparsity preservation, not as a primary quality comparison. Current dense-hardware inference is slower than GPT-2, so neuromorphic deployment is presented as a future sparsity-driven opportunity rather than an achieved hardware speedup.

  • 1 authors
·
May 19

Building a Production Greek-English Speech Recognizer

We report a multi-month engineering program to build Sophea, a production bilingual Greek-English automatic speech recognition system. We evaluate the system against nine production gates covering Greek and English word error rate, language identification, and hallucinations on non-speech audio. Across twenty-three training iterations and two model architectures, no training-data composition passed all nine gates simultaneously. Meeting the Greek noisy-environment target required about 1,500 steps of dense domain exposure, while preserving English language identification tolerated only about 250 steps, or about 1,250 with a rebalanced mix that reduced Greek accuracy. We describe a six-stage data pipeline in which calibrating an audio-quality filter against in-domain anchors reduced the discarded share of scored Greek audio from 98.7 percent to 10.6 percent. A pre-registered ablation isolated a hallucination defect to one training-data package. A three-model ROVER ensemble increased gate coverage from 4-7 of 9 for individual models to 9 of 9 and reduced overlapping-speech WER from 53.35 percent to 37.87 percent, a 29 percent relative improvement. A separate learned per-clip arbiter over two models is listed as sophea/asr-k1 (preview) on the public Open ASR Leaderboard, with 4.26 percent average WER across eight public English test sets, and reaches 25.88 percent WER on live Greek noisy-environment traffic. We also document five cases in which a measurement tool produced a plausible but incorrect result and seven substantial approaches that were evaluated but not shipped. No model weights or training data are released; we report methodology and quantitative results only.

KIEFERSA KIEFER
·
Sep 10 3

Seedream 3.0 Technical Report

We present Seedream 3.0, a high-performance Chinese-English bilingual image generation foundation model. We develop several technical improvements to address existing challenges in Seedream 2.0, including alignment with complicated prompts, fine-grained typography generation, suboptimal visual aesthetics and fidelity, and limited image resolutions. Specifically, the advancements of Seedream 3.0 stem from improvements across the entire pipeline, from data construction to model deployment. At the data stratum, we double the dataset using a defect-aware training paradigm and a dual-axis collaborative data-sampling framework. Furthermore, we adopt several effective techniques such as mixed-resolution training, cross-modality RoPE, representation alignment loss, and resolution-aware timestep sampling in the pre-training phase. During the post-training stage, we utilize diversified aesthetic captions in SFT, and a VLM-based reward model with scaling, thereby achieving outputs that well align with human preferences. Furthermore, Seedream 3.0 pioneers a novel acceleration paradigm. By employing consistent noise expectation and importance-aware timestep sampling, we achieve a 4 to 8 times speedup while maintaining image quality. Seedream 3.0 demonstrates significant improvements over Seedream 2.0: it enhances overall capabilities, in particular for text-rendering in complicated Chinese characters which is important to professional typography generation. In addition, it provides native high-resolution output (up to 2K), allowing it to generate images with high visual quality.

  • 31 authors
·
Apr 15, 2025 8

SenseNova-U1.5: Towards Native Unified Visual Intelligence

We launch SenseNova-U1.5, an 8B-MoT native unified multimodal model that understands, reasons about, and generates visual content within an encoder-free and VAE-free architecture. We strengthen its visual interface through spatially coherent patch reconstruction and scale its training with carefully curated generation and editing data, improved task formulation, structural prompt enhancement, and native resolutions of up to 4K. For post-training, we optimize specialized experts for visual aesthetics, bilingual text rendering, infographic generation, and image editing, and consolidate their capabilities through multi-expert on-policy distillation. Across extensive evaluations, SenseNova-U1.5 largely advances image fidelity, text rendering, complex composition, multi-reference editing, and interleaved generation, while improving instruction following and preserving subject identity, geometry, and unmodified regions. Despite limited exposure to structured formats in its generation data, SenseNova-U1.5 generalizes effectively to long, complex, and structured visual instructions, further proving that multimodal understanding can transfer to visual planning and creation. Together, these findings position native unified modelling as a promising path towards systems that perceive, reason and create within a fully end-to-end framework. We will open-source training code, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation.

  • 65 authors
·
Sep 9 3

Teaching a Language Model to Speak the Language of Tools

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.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 29, 2025 1

Parallel Corpora for Machine Translation in Low-resource Indic Languages: A Comprehensive Review

Parallel corpora play an important role in training machine translation (MT) models, particularly for low-resource languages where high-quality bilingual data is scarce. This review provides a comprehensive overview of available parallel corpora for Indic languages, which span diverse linguistic families, scripts, and regional variations. We categorize these corpora into text-to-text, code-switched, and various categories of multimodal datasets, highlighting their significance in the development of robust multilingual MT systems. Beyond resource enumeration, we critically examine the challenges faced in corpus creation, including linguistic diversity, script variation, data scarcity, and the prevalence of informal textual content.We also discuss and evaluate these corpora in various terms such as alignment quality and domain representativeness. Furthermore, we address open challenges such as data imbalance across Indic languages, the trade-off between quality and quantity, and the impact of noisy, informal, and dialectal data on MT performance. Finally, we outline future directions, including leveraging cross-lingual transfer learning, expanding multilingual datasets, and integrating multimodal resources to enhance translation quality. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first comprehensive review of parallel corpora specifically tailored for low-resource Indic languages in the context of machine translation.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 2, 2025

CareBot: A Pioneering Full-Process Open-Source Medical Language Model

Recently, both closed-source LLMs and open-source communities have made significant strides, outperforming humans in various general domains. However, their performance in specific professional domains such as medicine, especially within the open-source community, remains suboptimal due to the complexity of medical knowledge. In this paper, we propose CareBot, a bilingual medical LLM, which leverages a comprehensive approach integrating continuous pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). Our novel two-stage CPT method, comprising Stable CPT and Boost CPT, effectively bridges the gap between general and domain-specific data, facilitating a smooth transition from pre-training to fine-tuning and enhancing domain knowledge progressively. We also introduce DataRater, a model designed to assess data quality during CPT, ensuring that the training data is both accurate and relevant. For SFT, we develope a large and diverse bilingual dataset, along with ConFilter, a metric to enhance multi-turn dialogue quality, which is crucial to improving the model's ability to handle more complex dialogues. The combination of high-quality data sources and innovative techniques significantly improves CareBot's performance across a range of medical applications. Our rigorous evaluations on Chinese and English benchmarks confirm CareBot's effectiveness in medical consultation and education. These advancements not only address current limitations in medical LLMs but also set a new standard for developing effective and reliable open-source models in the medical domain. We will open-source the datasets and models later, contributing valuable resources to the research community.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 12, 2024

A General-Purpose Multilingual Document Encoder

Massively multilingual pretrained transformers (MMTs) have tremendously pushed the state of the art on multilingual NLP and cross-lingual transfer of NLP models in particular. While a large body of work leveraged MMTs to mine parallel data and induce bilingual document embeddings, much less effort has been devoted to training general-purpose (massively) multilingual document encoder that can be used for both supervised and unsupervised document-level tasks. In this work, we pretrain a massively multilingual document encoder as a hierarchical transformer model (HMDE) in which a shallow document transformer contextualizes sentence representations produced by a state-of-the-art pretrained multilingual sentence encoder. We leverage Wikipedia as a readily available source of comparable documents for creating training data, and train HMDE by means of a cross-lingual contrastive objective, further exploiting the category hierarchy of Wikipedia for creation of difficult negatives. We evaluate the effectiveness of HMDE in two arguably most common and prominent cross-lingual document-level tasks: (1) cross-lingual transfer for topical document classification and (2) cross-lingual document retrieval. HMDE is significantly more effective than (i) aggregations of segment-based representations and (ii) multilingual Longformer. Crucially, owing to its massively multilingual lower transformer, HMDE successfully generalizes to languages unseen in document-level pretraining. We publicly release our code and models at https://github.com/ogaloglu/pre-training-multilingual-document-encoders .

  • 3 authors
·
May 11, 2023

A Novel Paradigm Boosting Translation Capabilities of Large Language Models

This paper presents a study on strategies to enhance the translation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of machine translation (MT) tasks. The paper proposes a novel paradigm consisting of three stages: Secondary Pre-training using Extensive Monolingual Data, Continual Pre-training with Interlinear Text Format Documents, and Leveraging Source-Language Consistent Instruction for Supervised Fine-Tuning. Previous research on LLMs focused on various strategies for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), but their effectiveness has been limited. While traditional machine translation approaches rely on vast amounts of parallel bilingual data, our paradigm highlights the importance of using smaller sets of high-quality bilingual data. We argue that the focus should be on augmenting LLMs' cross-lingual alignment abilities during pre-training rather than solely relying on extensive bilingual data during SFT. Experimental results conducted using the Llama2 model, particularly on Chinese-Llama2 after monolingual augmentation, demonstrate the improved translation capabilities of LLMs. A significant contribution of our approach lies in Stage2: Continual Pre-training with Interlinear Text Format Documents, which requires less than 1B training data, making our method highly efficient. Additionally, in Stage3, we observed that setting instructions consistent with the source language benefits the supervised fine-tuning process. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous work and achieves superior performance compared to models such as NLLB-54B and GPT3.5-text-davinci-003, despite having a significantly smaller parameter count of only 7B or 13B. This achievement establishes our method as a pioneering strategy in the field of machine translation.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 17, 2024

GLEAM: Learning to Match and Explain in Cross-View Geo-Localization

Cross-View Geo-Localization (CVGL) focuses on identifying correspondences between images captured from distinct perspectives of the same geographical location. However, existing CVGL approaches are typically restricted to a single view or modality, and their direct visual matching strategy lacks interpretability: they only determine whether two images correspond, without explaining the rationale behind the match. In this paper, we present GLEAM-C, a foundational CVGL model that unifies multiple views and modalities-including UAV imagery, street maps, panoramic views, and ground photographs-by aligning them exclusively with satellite imagery. Our framework enhances training efficiency through optimized implementation while achieving accuracy comparable to prior modality-specific CVGL models through a two-phase training strategy. Moreover, to address the lack of interpretability in traditional CVGL methods, we leverage the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to propose a new task, GLEAM-X, which combines cross-view correspondence prediction with explainable reasoning. To support this task, we construct a bilingual benchmark using GPT-4o and Doubao-1.5-Thinking-Vision-Pro to generate training and testing data. The test set is further refined through detailed human revision, enabling systematic evaluation of explainable cross-view reasoning and advancing transparency and scalability in geo-localization. Together, GLEAM-C and GLEAM-X form a comprehensive CVGL pipeline that integrates multi-modal, multi-view alignment with interpretable correspondence analysis, unifying accurate cross-view matching with explainable reasoning and advancing Geo-Localization by enabling models to better Explain And Match. Code and datasets used in this work will be made publicly accessible at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/GLEAM.

  • 14 authors
·
Sep 9, 2025

The Role of Mixed-Language Documents for Multilingual Large Language Model Pretraining

Multilingual large language models achieve impressive cross-lingual performance despite largely monolingual pretraining. While bilingual data in pretraining corpora is widely believed to enable these abilities, details of its contributions remain unclear. We investigate this question by pretraining models from scratch under controlled conditions, comparing the standard web corpus with a monolingual-only version that removes all multilingual documents. Despite constituting only 2% of the corpus, removing bilingual data causes translation performance to drop 56% in BLEU, while behaviour on cross-lingual QA and general reasoning tasks remains stable, with training curves largely overlapping the baseline. To understand this asymmetry, we categorize bilingual data into parallel (14%), code-switching (72%), and miscellaneous documents (14%) based on the semantic relevance of content in different languages. We then conduct granular ablations by reintroducing parallel or code-switching data into the monolingual-only corpus. Our experiments reveal that parallel data almost fully restores translation performance (91% of the unfiltered baseline), whereas code-switching contributes minimally. Other cross-lingual tasks remain largely unaffected by either type. These findings reveal that translation critically depends on systematic token-level alignments from parallel data, whereas cross-lingual understanding and reasoning appear to be achievable even without bilingual data.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 22

Domain Terminology Integration into Machine Translation: Leveraging Large Language Models

This paper discusses the methods that we used for our submissions to the WMT 2023 Terminology Shared Task for German-to-English (DE-EN), English-to-Czech (EN-CS), and Chinese-to-English (ZH-EN) language pairs. The task aims to advance machine translation (MT) by challenging participants to develop systems that accurately translate technical terms, ultimately enhancing communication and understanding in specialised domains. To this end, we conduct experiments that utilise large language models (LLMs) for two purposes: generating synthetic bilingual terminology-based data, and post-editing translations generated by an MT model through incorporating pre-approved terms. Our system employs a four-step process: (i) using an LLM to generate bilingual synthetic data based on the provided terminology, (ii) fine-tuning a generic encoder-decoder MT model, with a mix of the terminology-based synthetic data generated in the first step and a randomly sampled portion of the original generic training data, (iii) generating translations with the fine-tuned MT model, and (iv) finally, leveraging an LLM for terminology-constrained automatic post-editing of the translations that do not include the required terms. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in improving the integration of pre-approved terms into translations. The number of terms incorporated into the translations of the blind dataset increases from an average of 36.67% with the generic model to an average of 72.88% by the end of the process. In other words, successful utilisation of terms nearly doubles across the three language pairs.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 22, 2023

D-ORCA: Dialogue-Centric Optimization for Robust Audio-Visual Captioning

Spoken dialogue is a primary source of information in videos; therefore, accurately identifying who spoke what and when is essential for deep video understanding. We introduce D-ORCA, a dialogue-centric omni-modal large language model optimized for robust audio-visual captioning. We further curate DVD, a large-scale, high-quality bilingual dataset comprising nearly 40,000 multi-party dialogue videos for training and 2000 videos for evaluation in English and Mandarin, addressing a critical gap in the open-source ecosystem. To ensure fine-grained captioning accuracy, we adopt group relative policy optimization with three novel reward functions that assess speaker attribution accuracy, global speech content accuracy, and sentence-level temporal boundary alignment. These rewards are derived from evaluation metrics widely used in speech processing and, to our knowledge, are applied for the first time as reinforcement learning objectives for audio-visual captioning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D-ORCA substantially outperforms existing open-source models in speaker identification, speech recognition, and temporal grounding. Notably, despite having only 8 billion parameters, D-ORCA achieves performance competitive with Qwen3-Omni across several general-purpose audio-visual understanding benchmarks. Demos are available at https://d-orca-llm.github.io/{https://d-orca-llm.github.io/}. Our code, data, and checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/WeChatCV/D-ORCA/{https://github.com/WeChatCV/D-ORCA/}.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 8

MIND Your Language: A Multilingual Dataset for Cross-lingual News Recommendation

Digital news platforms use news recommenders as the main instrument to cater to the individual information needs of readers. Despite an increasingly language-diverse online community, in which many Internet users consume news in multiple languages, the majority of news recommendation focuses on major, resource-rich languages, and English in particular. Moreover, nearly all news recommendation efforts assume monolingual news consumption, whereas more and more users tend to consume information in at least two languages. Accordingly, the existing body of work on news recommendation suffers from a lack of publicly available multilingual benchmarks that would catalyze development of news recommenders effective in multilingual settings and for low-resource languages. Aiming to fill this gap, we introduce xMIND, an open, multilingual news recommendation dataset derived from the English MIND dataset using machine translation, covering a set of 14 linguistically and geographically diverse languages, with digital footprints of varying sizes. Using xMIND, we systematically benchmark several state-of-the-art content-based neural news recommenders (NNRs) in both zero-shot (ZS-XLT) and few-shot (FS-XLT) cross-lingual transfer scenarios, considering both monolingual and bilingual news consumption patterns. Our findings reveal that (i) current NNRs, even when based on a multilingual language model, suffer from substantial performance losses under ZS-XLT and that (ii) inclusion of target-language data in FS-XLT training has limited benefits, particularly when combined with a bilingual news consumption. Our findings thus warrant a broader research effort in multilingual and cross-lingual news recommendation. The xMIND dataset is available at https://github.com/andreeaiana/xMIND.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 26, 2024

WeEdit: A Dataset, Benchmark and Glyph-Guided Framework for Text-centric Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing aims to modify specific content within existing images according to user-provided instructions while preserving non-target regions. Beyond traditional object- and style-centric manipulation, text-centric image editing focuses on modifying, translating, or rearranging textual elements embedded within images. However, existing leading models often struggle to execute complex text editing precisely, frequently producing blurry or hallucinated characters. We attribute these failures primarily to the lack of specialized training paradigms tailored for text-centric editing, as well as the absence of large-scale datasets and standardized benchmarks necessary for a closed-loop training and evaluation system. To address these limitations, we present WeEdit, a systematic solution encompassing a scalable data construction pipeline, two benchmarks, and a tailored two-stage training strategy. Specifically, we propose a novel HTML-based automatic editing pipeline, which generates 330K training pairs covering diverse editing operations and 15 languages, accompanied by standardized bilingual and multilingual benchmarks for comprehensive evaluation. On the algorithmic side, we employ glyph-guided supervised fine-tuning to inject explicit spatial and content priors, followed by a multi-objective reinforcement learning stage to align generation with instruction adherence, text clarity, and background preservation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WeEdit outperforms previous open-source models by a clear margin across diverse editing operations.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 12 1

Rethinking Uncertainly Missing and Ambiguous Visual Modality in Multi-Modal Entity Alignment

As a crucial extension of entity alignment (EA), multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to identify identical entities across disparate knowledge graphs (KGs) by exploiting associated visual information. However, existing MMEA approaches primarily concentrate on the fusion paradigm of multi-modal entity features, while neglecting the challenges presented by the pervasive phenomenon of missing and intrinsic ambiguity of visual images. In this paper, we present a further analysis of visual modality incompleteness, benchmarking latest MMEA models on our proposed dataset MMEA-UMVM, where the types of alignment KGs covering bilingual and monolingual, with standard (non-iterative) and iterative training paradigms to evaluate the model performance. Our research indicates that, in the face of modality incompleteness, models succumb to overfitting the modality noise, and exhibit performance oscillations or declines at high rates of missing modality. This proves that the inclusion of additional multi-modal data can sometimes adversely affect EA. To address these challenges, we introduce UMAEA , a robust multi-modal entity alignment approach designed to tackle uncertainly missing and ambiguous visual modalities. It consistently achieves SOTA performance across all 97 benchmark splits, significantly surpassing existing baselines with limited parameters and time consumption, while effectively alleviating the identified limitations of other models. Our code and benchmark data are available at https://github.com/zjukg/UMAEA.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 30, 2023

Pretraining Strategies using Monolingual and Parallel Data for Low-Resource Machine Translation

This research article examines the effectiveness of various pretraining strategies for developing machine translation models tailored to low-resource languages. Although this work considers several low-resource languages, including Afrikaans, Swahili, and Zulu, the translation model is specifically developed for Lingala, an under-resourced African language, building upon the pretraining approach introduced by Reid and Artetxe (2021), originally designed for high-resource languages. Through a series of comprehensive experiments, we explore different pretraining methodologies, including the integration of multiple languages and the use of both monolingual and parallel data during the pretraining phase. Our findings indicate that pretraining on multiple languages and leveraging both monolingual and parallel data significantly enhance translation quality. This study offers valuable insights into effective pretraining strategies for low-resource machine translation, helping to bridge the performance gap between high-resource and low-resource languages. The results contribute to the broader goal of developing more inclusive and accurate NLP models for marginalized communities and underrepresented populations. The code and datasets used in this study are publicly available to facilitate further research and ensure reproducibility, with the exception of certain data that may no longer be accessible due to changes in public availability.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025

Bridging Cross-Lingual Gaps During Leveraging the Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Pretraining for Text Generation and Understanding

For multilingual sequence-to-sequence pretrained language models (multilingual Seq2Seq PLMs), e.g. mBART, the self-supervised pretraining task is trained on a wide range of monolingual languages, e.g. 25 languages from CommonCrawl, while the downstream cross-lingual tasks generally progress on a bilingual language subset, e.g. English-German, making there exists the data discrepancy, namely domain discrepancy, and cross-lingual learning objective discrepancy, namely task discrepancy, between the pretraining and finetuning stages. To bridge the above cross-lingual domain and task gaps, we extend the vanilla pretrain-finetune pipeline with extra code-switching restore task. Specifically, the first stage employs the self-supervised code-switching restore task as a pretext task, allowing the multilingual Seq2Seq PLMs to acquire some in-domain alignment information. And for the second stage, we fine-tune the model on downstream data normally. Experiments on both NLG evaluation (12 bilingual translation tasks, 30 zero-shot translation tasks, and 2 cross-lingual summarization tasks) and NLU evaluation (7 cross-lingual natural language inference tasks) show our model outperforms the strong baseline mBART with standard finetuning strategy, consistently. Analyses indicate our approach could narrow the Euclidean distance of cross-lingual sentence representations, and improve the model generalization with trivial computational cost. We release the code at: https://github.com/zanchangtong/CSR4mBART.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 16, 2022

Improving Bilingual Capabilities of Language Models to Support Diverse Linguistic Practices in Education

Large language models (LLMs) offer promise in generating educational content, providing instructor feedback, and reducing teacher workload on assessments. While prior studies have focused on studying LLM-powered learning analytics, limited research has examined how effective LLMs are in a bilingual context. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of multilingual large language models (MLLMs) across monolingual (English-only, Spanish-only) and bilingual (Spanglish) student writing. We present a learning analytics use case that details LLM performance in assessing acceptable and unacceptable explanations of Science and Social Science concepts. Our findings reveal a significant bias in the grading performance of pre-trained models for bilingual writing compared to English-only and Spanish-only writing. Following this, we fine-tune open-source MLLMs including Llama 3.1 and Mistral NeMo using synthetic datasets generated in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Our experiments indicate that the models perform significantly better for all three languages after fine-tuning with bilingual data. This study highlights the potential of enhancing MLLM effectiveness to support authentic language practices amongst bilingual learners. It also aims to illustrate the value of incorporating non-English languages into the design and implementation of language models in education.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 6, 2024

Centurio: On Drivers of Multilingual Ability of Large Vision-Language Model

Most Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to date are trained predominantly on English data, which makes them struggle to understand non-English input and fail to generate output in the desired target language. Existing efforts mitigate these issues by adding multilingual training data, but do so in a largely ad-hoc manner, lacking insight into how different training mixes tip the scale for different groups of languages. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation into the training strategies for massively multilingual LVLMs. First, we conduct a series of multi-stage experiments spanning 13 downstream vision-language tasks and 43 languages, systematically examining: (1) the number of training languages that can be included without degrading English performance and (2) optimal language distributions of pre-training as well as (3) instruction-tuning data. Further, we (4) investigate how to improve multilingual text-in-image understanding, and introduce a new benchmark for the task. Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that one can (i) include as many as 100 training languages simultaneously (ii) with as little as 25-50\% of non-English data, to greatly improve multilingual performance while retaining strong English performance. We further find that (iii) including non-English OCR data in pre-training and instruction-tuning is paramount for improving multilingual text-in-image understanding. Finally, we put all our findings together and train Centurio, a 100-language LVLM, offering state-of-the-art performance in an evaluation covering 14 tasks and 56 languages.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 9, 2025 3

Distilling Efficient Language-Specific Models for Cross-Lingual Transfer

Massively multilingual Transformers (MMTs), such as mBERT and XLM-R, are widely used for cross-lingual transfer learning. While these are pretrained to represent hundreds of languages, end users of NLP systems are often interested only in individual languages. For such purposes, the MMTs' language coverage makes them unnecessarily expensive to deploy in terms of model size, inference time, energy, and hardware cost. We thus propose to extract compressed, language-specific models from MMTs which retain the capacity of the original MMTs for cross-lingual transfer. This is achieved by distilling the MMT bilingually, i.e., using data from only the source and target language of interest. Specifically, we use a two-phase distillation approach, termed BiStil: (i) the first phase distils a general bilingual model from the MMT, while (ii) the second, task-specific phase sparsely fine-tunes the bilingual "student" model using a task-tuned variant of the original MMT as its "teacher". We evaluate this distillation technique in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer across a number of standard cross-lingual benchmarks. The key results indicate that the distilled models exhibit minimal degradation in target language performance relative to the base MMT despite being significantly smaller and faster. Furthermore, we find that they outperform multilingually distilled models such as DistilmBERT and MiniLMv2 while having a very modest training budget in comparison, even on a per-language basis. We also show that bilingual models distilled from MMTs greatly outperform bilingual models trained from scratch. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/AlanAnsell/bistil.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 2, 2023