Adapting Language-Specific LLMs to a Reasoning Model in One Day via Model Merging -- An Open Recipe

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Hauptverfasser: Pipatanakul, Kunat, Taveekitworachai, Pittawat, Manakul, Potsawee, Tharnpipitchai, Kasima
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Pipatanakul, Kunat
Taveekitworachai, Pittawat
Manakul, Potsawee
Tharnpipitchai, Kasima
author_facet Pipatanakul, Kunat
Taveekitworachai, Pittawat
Manakul, Potsawee
Tharnpipitchai, Kasima
contents This paper investigates data selection and model merging methodologies aimed at incorporating advanced reasoning capabilities such as those of DeepSeek R1 into language-specific large language models (LLMs), with a particular focus on the Thai LLM. Our goal is to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language-specific LLMs while maintaining their target language abilities. DeepSeek R1 excels in reasoning but primarily benefits high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. However, low-resource languages remain underserved due to the dominance of English-centric training data and model optimizations, which limit performance in these languages. This limitation results in unreliable code-switching and diminished effectiveness on tasks in low-resource languages. Meanwhile, local and regional LLM initiatives have attempted to bridge this gap by developing language-specific LLMs that focus on improving local linguistic fidelity. We demonstrate that, with only publicly available datasets and a computational budget of $120, it is possible to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language-specific LLMs to match the level of DeepSeek R1, without compromising their performance on target language tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_09056
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adapting Language-Specific LLMs to a Reasoning Model in One Day via Model Merging -- An Open Recipe
Pipatanakul, Kunat
Taveekitworachai, Pittawat
Manakul, Potsawee
Tharnpipitchai, Kasima
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
This paper investigates data selection and model merging methodologies aimed at incorporating advanced reasoning capabilities such as those of DeepSeek R1 into language-specific large language models (LLMs), with a particular focus on the Thai LLM. Our goal is to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language-specific LLMs while maintaining their target language abilities. DeepSeek R1 excels in reasoning but primarily benefits high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. However, low-resource languages remain underserved due to the dominance of English-centric training data and model optimizations, which limit performance in these languages. This limitation results in unreliable code-switching and diminished effectiveness on tasks in low-resource languages. Meanwhile, local and regional LLM initiatives have attempted to bridge this gap by developing language-specific LLMs that focus on improving local linguistic fidelity. We demonstrate that, with only publicly available datasets and a computational budget of $120, it is possible to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language-specific LLMs to match the level of DeepSeek R1, without compromising their performance on target language tasks.
title Adapting Language-Specific LLMs to a Reasoning Model in One Day via Model Merging -- An Open Recipe
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09056