# Code Mixologist : A Practitioner's Guide to Building Code-Mixed LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11181/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [GLUECoS : An Evaluation Benchmark for Code-Switched NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12376/) (2020)
- [LinCE: A Centralized Benchmark for Linguistic Code-switching Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04322/) (2020)
- [Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14235/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Code-switching: Linguistic and Social Perspectives for Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01967/) (2023)
- [Prompting Multilingual Large Language Models to Generate Code-Mixed Texts: The Case of South East Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13592/) (2023)
- [The Decades Progress on Code-Switching Research in NLP: A Systematic Survey on Trends and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09660/) (2022)
- [Code-Switching Red-Teaming: LLM Evaluation for Safety and Multilingual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15481/) (2024)
- [Code-Switching Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Transfer in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02460/) (2024)
- [Challenges and Limitations with the Metrics Measuring the Complexity of Code-Mixed Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10123/) (2021)
- [Representativeness as a Forgotten Lesson for Multilingual and Code-switched Data Collection and Preparation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20470/) (2023)
- [Krutrim LLM: Multilingual Foundational Model for over a Billion People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09642/) (2025)
- [Lost in the Mix: Evaluating LLM Understanding of Code-Switched Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14012/) (2025)
- [From Human Judgements to Predictive Models: Unravelling Acceptability in Code-Mixed Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05572/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Role of Transliteration in In-Context Learning for Low-resource Languages Written in Non-Latin Scripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02320/) (2024)
- [Mechanistic Understanding and Mitigation of Language Confusion in English-Centric Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16538/) (2025)
- [Minimal Pair-Based Evaluation of Code-Switching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01840/) (2025)
- [Code-Switched Text Synthesis in Unseen Language Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16724/) (2023)
- [Code-Mixer Ya Nahi: Novel Approaches to Measuring Multilingual LLMs' Code-Mixing Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11079/) (2024)
- [COMI-LINGUA: Expert Annotated Large-Scale Dataset for Multitask NLP in Hindi-English Code-Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21670/) (2025)
- [Constructing Code-mixed Universal Dependency Forest for Unbiased Cross-lingual Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12258/) (2023)
- [Linguistics Theory Meets LLM: Code-Switched Text Generation via Equivalence Constrained Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22660/) (2024)
- [Intent Detection for code-mix utterances in task oriented dialogue systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02914/) (2018)
- [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)
- [CHAI for LLMs: Improving Code-Mixed Translation in Large Language Models through Reinforcement Learning with AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09073/) (2024)
- [Mixed-Distil-BERT: Code-mixed Language Modeling for Bangla, English, and Hindi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10272/) (2023)
- [MUTANT: A Recipe for Multilingual Tokenizer Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03237/) (2025)
- [Retraining DistilBERT for a Voice Shopping Assistant by Using Universal Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15737/) (2021)
- [Persona-aware Generative Model for Code-mixed Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02915/) (2023)
- [Conditioning LLMs to Generate Code-Switched Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12924/) (2025)
- [Gradual Code-Switching as Inference-Time Cross-Lingual Representational Alignment for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05678/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Code-mixing and code-switching (CSW) remain challenging phenomena for large language models (LLMs). Despite recent advances in multilingual modeling, LLMs often struggle in mixed-language settings, exhibiting systematic degradation in grammaticality, factuality, and safety behavior. This work provides a comprehensive overview of CSW research in modern large language model settings. We introduce a unifying taxonomy that organizes prior work along dimensions of data, modeling, and evaluation, and we distill these findings into a practical playbook of actionable recommendations for building, adapting, and evaluating CSW-capable LLMs. We review modeling approaches ranging from CSW-tailored pre-training and task-specific post-training to prompting strategies and in-context learning. We analyze current evaluation practices, highlighting sources of instability and limited reproducibility, and we catalog existing benchmarks while critically examining their linguistic coverage and English-centric biases. Finally, we discuss emerging safety concerns, including use of code-mixing as a mechanism for bypassing model safeguards, and identify open research challenges.
