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ACL Findings2024

LLMs Beyond English: Scaling the Multilingual Capability of LLMs with Cross-Lingual Feedback

Wen Lai, Mohsen Mesgar, Alexander Fraser

Abstract

To democratize large language models (LLMs) to most natural languages, it is imperative to make these models capable of understanding and generating texts in many languages, in particular low-resource ones. While recent multilingual LLMs demonstrate remarkable performance in such capabilities, these LLMs still support a limited number of human languages due to the lack of training data for low-resource languages. Moreover, these LLMs are not yet aligned with human preference for downstream tasks, which is crucial for the success of LLMs in English. In this paper, we introduce xLLaMA-100 and xBLOOM-100 (collectively xLLMs-100), which scale the multilingual capabilities of LLaMA and BLOOM to 100 languages. To do so, we construct two datasets: a multilingual instruction dataset including 100 languages, which represents the largest language coverage to date, and a crosslingual human feedback dataset encompassing 30 languages. We perform multilingual instruction tuning on the constructed instruction data and further align the LLMs with human feedback using the DPO algorithm on our crosslingual human feedback dataset. We evaluate the multilingual understanding and generating capabilities of xLLMs-100 on five multilingual benchmarks. Experimental results show that xLLMs-100 consistently outperforms its peers across the benchmarks by considerable margins, defining a new state-of-the-art multilingual LLM that supports 100 languages 1 .

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Cited by top-tier papers9

  1. ATLAS: Adaptive Transfer Scaling Laws for Multilingual Pretraining, Finetuning, and Decoding the Curse of MultilingualityShayne Longpre, Sneha Kudugunta, Niklas Muennighoff, I-Hung Hsu et al.ICLR 2026 · 20 citations
  2. RLHF Can Speak Many Languages: Unlocking Multilingual Preference Optimization for LLMsJohn Dang, Arash Ahmadian, Kelly Marchisio, Julia Kreutzer et al.EMNLP 2024 · 4 citations
  3. From English to Second Language Mastery: Enhancing LLMs with Cross-Lingual Continued Instruction TuningLinjuan Wu, Haoran Wei, Baosong Yang, Weiming LuACL 2025 · 3 citations
  4. Exploring Polyglot Harmony: On Multilingual Data Allocation for Large Language Models PretrainingPing Guo, Yubing Ren, Binbin Liu, Fengze Liu et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 2 citations
  5. The GaoYao Benchmark: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Multilingual and Multicultural Abilities of Large Language ModelsYilun Liu, Chunguang Zhao, Mengyao Piao, Lingqi Miao et al.ACL 2026

Builds on20

  1. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
  2. LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language ModelsEdward J. Hu, Yelong Shen, Phillip Wallis, Zeyuan Allen-Zhu et al.ICLR 2022 · 18,833 citations
  3. Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward ModelRafael Rafailov, Archit Sharma, Eric Mitchell, Christopher D. Manning et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 10,924 citations
  4. Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated InstructionsYizhong Wang, Yeganeh Kordi, Swaroop Mishra, Alisa Liu et al.ACL 2023 · 540 citations
  5. Crosslingual Generalization through Multitask FinetuningNiklas Muennighoff, Thomas Wang, Lintang Sutawika, Adam Roberts et al.ACL 2023 · 319 citations

Related papers

  1. LLaMAX: Scaling Linguistic Horizons of LLM by Enhancing Translation Capabilities Beyond 100 LanguagesYinquan Lu, Wenhao Zhu, Lei Li, Yu Qiao et al.EMNLP Findings 2024 · 18 citations
  2. X-ALMA: Plug & Play Modules and Adaptive Rejection for Quality Translation at ScaleHaoran Xu, Kenton Murray, Philipp Koehn, Hieu Hoang et al.ICLR 2025
  3. Glot500: Scaling Multilingual Corpora and Language Models to 500 LanguagesAyyoob Imani, Peiqin Lin, Amir Hossein Kargaran, Silvia Severini et al.ACL 2023 · 14 citations
  4. X-Instruction: Aligning Language Model in Low-resource Languages with Self-curated Cross-lingual InstructionsChong Li, Wen Yang, Jiajun Zhang, Jinliang Lu et al.ACL Findings 2024 · 3 citations
  5. Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language ModelAhmet Üstün, Viraat Aryabumi, Zheng Xin Yong, Wei-Yin Ko et al.ACL 2024
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