LLaMA Beyond English: An Empirical Study on Language Capability Transfer

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhao, Jun, Zhang, Zhihao, Gao, Luhui, Zhang, Qi, Gui, Tao, Huang, Xuanjing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhao, Jun
Zhang, Zhihao
Gao, Luhui
Zhang, Qi
Gui, Tao
Huang, Xuanjing
author_facet Zhao, Jun
Zhang, Zhihao
Gao, Luhui
Zhang, Qi
Gui, Tao
Huang, Xuanjing
contents In recent times, substantial advancements have been witnessed in large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, showcasing remarkable proficiency across a range of complex tasks. However, many mainstream LLMs (e.g. LLaMA) are pretrained on English-dominant corpus, which limits their performance in other non-English languages. In this paper, we focus on how to effectively transfer the capabilities of language generation and following instructions to a non-English language. To answer this question, we conduct an extensive empirical investigation based on LLaMA, accumulating over 1440 GPU hours. We analyze the impact of key factors such as vocabulary extension, further pretraining, and instruction tuning on transfer. To accurately assess the model's level of knowledge, we employ four widely used standardized testing benchmarks: C-Eval, MMLU, AGI-Eval, and GAOKAO-Bench. Furthermore, a comprehensive evaluation of the model's response quality is conducted, considering aspects such as accuracy, fluency, informativeness, logical coherence, and harmlessness, based on LLM-Eval, a benchmarks consisting instruction tasks from 17 diverse categories. Our evaluation results demonstrate that comparable performance to state-of-the-art transfer models can be achieved with less than 1% of the pretraining data, both in terms of knowledge alignment and response quality. Furthermore, the experimental outcomes across the thirteen low-resource languages also exhibit similar trends. We anticipate that the conclusions revealed by the experiments will aid the community in developing non-English LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_01055
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLaMA Beyond English: An Empirical Study on Language Capability Transfer
Zhao, Jun
Zhang, Zhihao
Gao, Luhui
Zhang, Qi
Gui, Tao
Huang, Xuanjing
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
In recent times, substantial advancements have been witnessed in large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, showcasing remarkable proficiency across a range of complex tasks. However, many mainstream LLMs (e.g. LLaMA) are pretrained on English-dominant corpus, which limits their performance in other non-English languages. In this paper, we focus on how to effectively transfer the capabilities of language generation and following instructions to a non-English language. To answer this question, we conduct an extensive empirical investigation based on LLaMA, accumulating over 1440 GPU hours. We analyze the impact of key factors such as vocabulary extension, further pretraining, and instruction tuning on transfer. To accurately assess the model's level of knowledge, we employ four widely used standardized testing benchmarks: C-Eval, MMLU, AGI-Eval, and GAOKAO-Bench. Furthermore, a comprehensive evaluation of the model's response quality is conducted, considering aspects such as accuracy, fluency, informativeness, logical coherence, and harmlessness, based on LLM-Eval, a benchmarks consisting instruction tasks from 17 diverse categories. Our evaluation results demonstrate that comparable performance to state-of-the-art transfer models can be achieved with less than 1% of the pretraining data, both in terms of knowledge alignment and response quality. Furthermore, the experimental outcomes across the thirteen low-resource languages also exhibit similar trends. We anticipate that the conclusions revealed by the experiments will aid the community in developing non-English LLMs.
title LLaMA Beyond English: An Empirical Study on Language Capability Transfer
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01055