# PLUG: Leveraging Pivot Language in Cross-Lingual Instruction Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08711/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2023.

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

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17926/) (2023)
- [Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07191/) (2021)
- [OpenAssistant Conversations -- Democratizing Large Language Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07327/) (2023)
- [Ragas: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15217/) (2023)
- [How Far Can Camels Go? Exploring the State of Instruction Tuning on Open Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04751/) (2023)
- [Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02707/) (2023)
- [MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12528/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10668/) (2021)
- [XTREME-R: Towards More Challenging and Nuanced Multilingual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07412/) (2021)
- [Extrapolating Large Language Models to Non-English by Aligning Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04948/) (2023)
- [Monolingual or Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Which Makes a Better Alpaca](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08958/) (2023)
- [Breaking Language Barriers in Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Insights and Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20246/) (2023)
- [Empowering Cross-lingual Abilities of Instruction-tuned Large Language Models by Translation-following demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14186/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07827/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Instruction Tuning With Just a Pinch of Multilinguality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01854/) (2024)
- [Understand, Solve and Translate: Bridging the Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02448/) (2025)
- [Turning English-centric LLMs Into Polyglots: How Much Multilinguality Is Needed?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12683/) (2023)
- [Linguistic Generalizability of Test-Time Scaling in Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17407/) (2025)
- [Understanding Cross-Lingual Alignment -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06228/) (2024)
- [Teaching Large Language Models an Unseen Language on the Fly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19167/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Routing in Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04694/) (2025)
- [Language Imbalance Driven Rewarding for Multilingual Self-improving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08964/) (2024)
- [MultiChartQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Multi-Chart Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14179/) (2024)
- [Teaching Llama a New Language Through Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04042/) (2024)
- [Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Sequential Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07794/) (2024)
- [Layer Swapping for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01335/) (2024)
- [R1-T1: Fully Incentivizing Translation Capability in LLMs via Reasoning Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19735/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11072/) (2024)
- [Describe-then-Reason: Improving Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning through Visual Comprehension Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14604/) (2024)
- [Cross-lingual Transfer of Reward Models in Multilingual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18027/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in instruction tuning of large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14778/) (2024)
- [Getting More from Less: Large Language Models are Good Spontaneous Multilingual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13816/) (2024)
- [XIFBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Multilingual Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07539/) (2025)
- [Beyond the Final Layer: Intermediate Representations for Better Multilingual Calibration in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03136/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Multilingual Data Mixtures in Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25947/) (2025)
- [Implicit Cross-Lingual Rewarding for Efficient Multilingual Preference Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04647/) (2025)
- [Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09073/) (2024)
- [Why Not Transform Chat Large Language Models to Non-English?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13923/) (2024)
- [Can Code-Switched Texts Activate a Knowledge Switch in LLMs? A Case Study on English-Korean Code-Switching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18436/) (2024)
- [Beyond Monolingual Assumptions: A Survey of Code-Switched NLP in the Era of Large Language Models across Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07037/) (2025)
- [Document Intelligence in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13366/) (2025)
- [Enhancing LLM Language Adaption through Cross-lingual In-Context Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20484/) (2025)
- [Blessing of Multilinguality: A Systematic Analysis of Multilingual In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11364/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Instruction tuning has remarkably advanced large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to diverse human instructions. Despite the success in high-resource languages, its application in lower-resource ones faces challenges due to the imbalanced foundational abilities of LLMs across different languages, stemming from the uneven language distribution in their pre-training data. To tackle this issue, we propose pivot language guided generation (PLUG), an approach that utilizes a high-resource language, primarily English, as the pivot to enhance instruction tuning in lower-resource languages. It trains the model to first process instructions in the pivot language, and then produce responses in the target language. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a benchmark, X-AlpacaEval, of instructions in 4 languages (Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish), each annotated by professional translators. Our approach demonstrates a significant improvement in the instruction-following abilities of LLMs by 29% on average, compared to directly responding in the target language alone. Further experiments validate the versatility of our approach by employing alternative pivot languages beyond English to assist languages where LLMs exhibit lower proficiency. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/ytyz1307zzh/PLUG.