# mGPT: Few-Shot Learners Go Multilingual

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07580 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07580/

## Key facts

- Cited by 142 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 74 of its 117 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 74)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02243/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04009/) (2017)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06745/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 142)

- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07827/) (2024)
- [Fast-DetectGPT: Efficient Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text via Conditional Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05130/) (2023)
- [Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10588/) (2024)
- [Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10169/) (2023)
- [In-context Examples Selection for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02437/) (2022)
- [Having Beer after Prayer? Measuring Cultural Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14456/) (2023)
- [Tokenizer Choice For LLM Training: Negligible or Crucial?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08754/) (2023)
- [BLOOM+1: Adding Language Support to BLOOM for Zero-Shot Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09535/) (2022)
- [Language Generation Models Can Cause Harm: So What Can We Do About It? An Actionable Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07700/) (2022)
- [Testing the Predictions of Surprisal Theory in 11 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03667/) (2023)
- [Journey to the Center of the Knowledge Neurons: Discoveries of Language-Independent Knowledge Neurons and Degenerate Knowledge Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13198/) (2023)
- [Legal Prompt Engineering for Multilingual Legal Judgement Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02199/) (2022)
- [CroissantLLM: A Truly Bilingual French-English Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00786/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Large Language Model: A Survey of Resources, Taxonomy and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04925/) (2024)
- [Latxa: An Open Language Model and Evaluation Suite for Basque](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20266/) (2024)
- [Prompting Language Models for Linguistic Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07830/) (2022)
- [OFA: A Framework of Initializing Unseen Subword Embeddings for Efficient Large-scale Multilingual Continued Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08849/) (2023)
- [Understanding Cross-Lingual Alignment -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06228/) (2024)
- [IndiBias: A Benchmark Dataset to Measure Social Biases in Language Models for Indian Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20147/) (2024)
- [Preference Tuning For Toxicity Mitigation Generalizes Across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16235/) (2024)
- [Geographic and Geopolitical Biases of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10408/) (2022)
- [Efficiently Adapting Pretrained Language Models To New Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05741/) (2023)
- [MaLA-500: Massive Language Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13303/) (2024)
- [Language Versatilists vs. Specialists: An Empirical Revisiting on Multilingual Transfer Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06688/) (2023)
- [A Family of Pretrained Transformer Language Models for Russian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10931/) (2023)
- [Efficient Language Model Training through Cross-Lingual and Progressive Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09626/) (2023)
- [RuBLiMP: Russian Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19232/) (2024)
- [MERA: A Comprehensive LLM Evaluation in Russian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04531/) (2024)
- [MindMerger: Efficient Boosting LLM Reasoning in non-English Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17386/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent studies report that autoregressive language models can successfully solve many NLP tasks via zero- and few-shot learning paradigms, which opens up new possibilities for using the pre-trained language models. This paper introduces two autoregressive GPT-like models with 1.3 billion and 13 billion parameters trained on 60 languages from 25 language families using Wikipedia and Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus. We reproduce the GPT-3 architecture using GPT-2 sources and the sparse attention mechanism; Deepspeed and Megatron frameworks allow us to parallelize the training and inference steps effectively. The resulting models show performance on par with the recently released XGLM models by Facebook, covering more languages and enhancing NLP possibilities for low resource languages of CIS countries and Russian small nations. We detail the motivation for the choices of the architecture design, thoroughly describe the data preparation pipeline, and train five small versions of the model to choose the most optimal multilingual tokenization strategy. We measure the model perplexity in all covered languages and evaluate it on the wide spectre of multilingual tasks, including classification, generative, sequence labeling and knowledge probing. The models were evaluated with the zero-shot and few-shot methods. Furthermore, we compared the classification tasks with the state-of-the-art multilingual model XGLM. source code and the mGPT XL model are publicly released.