Got Compute, but No Data: Lessons From Post-training a Finnish LLM

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zosa, Elaine, Komulainen, Ville, Pyysalo, Sampo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zosa, Elaine
Komulainen, Ville
Pyysalo, Sampo
author_facet Zosa, Elaine
Komulainen, Ville
Pyysalo, Sampo
contents As LLMs gain more popularity as chatbots and general assistants, methods have been developed to enable LLMs to follow instructions and align with human preferences. These methods have found success in the field, but their effectiveness has not been demonstrated outside of high-resource languages. In this work, we discuss our experiences in post-training an LLM for instruction-following for English and Finnish. We use a multilingual LLM to translate instruction and preference datasets from English to Finnish. We perform instruction tuning and preference optimization in English and Finnish and evaluate the instruction-following capabilities of the model in both languages. Our results show that with a few hundred Finnish instruction samples we can obtain competitive performance in Finnish instruction-following. We also found that although preference optimization in English offers some cross-lingual benefits, we obtain our best results by using preference data from both languages. We release our model, datasets, and recipes under open licenses at https://huggingface.co/LumiOpen/Poro-34B-chat-OpenAssistant
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09407
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Got Compute, but No Data: Lessons From Post-training a Finnish LLM
Zosa, Elaine
Komulainen, Ville
Pyysalo, Sampo
Computation and Language
As LLMs gain more popularity as chatbots and general assistants, methods have been developed to enable LLMs to follow instructions and align with human preferences. These methods have found success in the field, but their effectiveness has not been demonstrated outside of high-resource languages. In this work, we discuss our experiences in post-training an LLM for instruction-following for English and Finnish. We use a multilingual LLM to translate instruction and preference datasets from English to Finnish. We perform instruction tuning and preference optimization in English and Finnish and evaluate the instruction-following capabilities of the model in both languages. Our results show that with a few hundred Finnish instruction samples we can obtain competitive performance in Finnish instruction-following. We also found that although preference optimization in English offers some cross-lingual benefits, we obtain our best results by using preference data from both languages. We release our model, datasets, and recipes under open licenses at https://huggingface.co/LumiOpen/Poro-34B-chat-OpenAssistant
title Got Compute, but No Data: Lessons From Post-training a Finnish LLM
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09407