How Vocabulary Sharing Facilitates Multilingualism in LLaMA?
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Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Models (LLMs), often show strong performance on English tasks, while exhibiting limitations on other languages. What is an LLM's multilingual capability when it is trained only on certain languages? The underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study endeavors to examine the multilingual capability of LLMs from the vocabulary sharing perspective by conducting an exhaustive analysis across 101 languages. Through the investigation of the performance gap before and after embedding fine-tuning, we discovered four distinct quadrants. By delving into each quadrant we provide actionable and efficient guidelines for tuning these languages. Extensive experiments reveal that existing LLMs possess multilingual capabilities that surpass our expectations, and we can significantly improve the multilingual performance of LLMs based on these attributes of each quadrant~footnoteurlhttps://github.com/CONE-MT/Vocabulary-Sharing-Facilitates-Multilingualism..
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 38 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2023.
Builds on
38 of 47 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 5; 2025: 5; 2026: 2.
12 papers.
- 2024LLaMAX: Scaling Linguistic Horizons of LLM by Enhancing Translation Capabilities Beyond 100 Languagescited by 48
- 2025Middle-Layer Representation Alignment for Cross-Lingual Transfer in Fine-Tuned LLMscited by 29
- 2024Multilingual Large Language Models: A Systematic Surveycited by 18
- 2025Rethinking Multilingual Continual Pretraining: Data Mixing for Adapting LLMs Across Languages and Resourcescited by 10
- 2026Mending the Holes: Mitigating Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Translationcited by 4
- 2024Mufu: Multilingual Fused Learning for Low-Resource Translation with LLMcited by 3
- 2025Multilingual LLMs Struggle to Link Orthography and Semantics in Bilingual Word Processingcited by 3
- 2025Incorporating Domain Knowledge into Materials Tokenizationcited by 2
- 2025EnAnchored-X2X: English-Anchored Optimization for Many-to-Many Translationcited by 2
- 2026BLUFF: Benchmarking the Detection of False and Synthetic Content across 58 Low-Resource Languagescited by 2
- 2024Evaluation Methodology for Large Language Models for Multilingual Document Question and Answercited by 0
- 2024Can linguists better understand DNA?cited by 0
- 2026Mending the Holes: Mitigating Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Translation13 Mar 2026
- 2026BLUFF: Benchmarking the Detection of False and Synthetic Content across 58 Low-Resource Languages28 Feb 2026
- 2025EnAnchored-X2X: English-Anchored Optimization for Many-to-Many Translation24 Sep 2025
- 2025Incorporating Domain Knowledge into Materials Tokenization9 Jun 2025
- 2025Rethinking Multilingual Continual Pretraining: Data Mixing for Adapting LLMs Across Languages and Resources5 Apr 2025
- 2025Middle-Layer Representation Alignment for Cross-Lingual Transfer in Fine-Tuned LLMs20 Feb 2025
- 2025Multilingual LLMs Struggle to Link Orthography and Semantics in Bilingual Word Processing15 Jan 2025
- 2024Can linguists better understand DNA?10 Dec 2024
- 2024Multilingual Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey17 Nov 2024
- 2024Mufu: Multilingual Fused Learning for Low-Resource Translation with LLM20 Sep 2024
- 2024LLaMAX: Scaling Linguistic Horizons of LLM by Enhancing Translation Capabilities Beyond 100 Languages8 Jul 2024
- 2024Evaluation Methodology for Large Language Models for Multilingual Document Question and Answer1 Feb 2024