# PersianMind: A Cross-Lingual Persian-English Large Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.06466 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06466/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01116/) (2023)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07316/) (2022)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02707/) (2023)
- [The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16884/) (2023)
- [WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05791/) (2019)
- [Training Neural Networks with Fixed Sparse Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09839/) (2021)
- [Scaling Down to Scale Up: A Guide to Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15647/) (2023)
- [AdaMix: Mixture-of-Adaptations for Parameter-efficient Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17451/) (2022)
- [AnglE-optimized Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12871/) (2023)
- [ParsBERT: Transformer-based Model for Persian Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12515/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Leveraging Online Data to Enhance Medical Knowledge in a Small Persian Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16000/) (2025)
- [Extending LLMs to New Languages: A Case Study of Llama and Persian Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13375/) (2024)
- [PsychoLex: Unveiling the Psychological Mind of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08848/) (2024)
- [PARSE: An Open-Domain Reasoning Question Answering Benchmark for Persian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01246/) (2026)
- [PersianRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for Persian Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02832/) (2024)
- [Persian-Phi: Efficient Cross-Lingual Adaptation of Compact LLMs via Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07454/) (2025)
- [The Annotation Bottleneck in Persian Text NLP: Persian as an Annotation-Scarce Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24698/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models demonstrate remarkable proficiency in various linguistic tasks and have extensive knowledge across various domains. Although they perform best in English, their ability in other languages is notable too. In contrast, open-source models, such as LLaMa, are primarily trained on English datasets, resulting in poor performance in non-English languages. In this paper, we introduce PersianMind, an open-source bilingual large language model which demonstrates comparable performance to closed-source GPT-3.5-turbo in the Persian language. By expanding LLaMa2's vocabulary with 10,000 Persian tokens and training it on a dataset comprising nearly 2 billion Persian tokens, we show that our approach preserves the model's English knowledge and employs transfer learning to excel at transferring task knowledge from one language to another.