Language Bias, Be Gone! CroissantLLM’s Balanced Bilingual Approach is Here to Stay

In an era where language models (LMs) predominantly cater to English, a revolutionary stride has been made with the introduction of CroissantLLM. This model bridges the linguistic divide by offering robust bilingual capabilities in both English and French. This development marks a significant departure from conventional models, often biased towards English, limiting their applicability in diverse linguistic landscapes. CroissantLLM, developed through the collaboration of researchers from multiple esteemed institutions and companies, including Illumina Technology, Unbabel, and INESC-ID Lisboa, among others, emerges as a beacon of innovation, championing the cause of linguistic inclusivity in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP).

The motivation behind CroissantLLM is rooted in recognizing the limitations imposed by English-centric data in language model training. Such an imbalance not only hinders the performance of models in non-English contexts but also underscores the critical need for truly bilingual models capable of understanding and generating languages with equal proficiency. Traditional approaches have largely overlooked this aspect, focusing on enhancing models’ capabilities predominantly in English. This has left a significant gap in bilingual or multilingual contexts, where the performance and utility of models in languages other than English remain suboptimal.

CroissantLLM addresses this gap head-on by adopting an innovative methodology that ensures balanced training on English and French data. The model is pre-trained on 3 trillion English and French tokens, maintaining a 1:1 English-to-French pre-training data ratio. This balanced approach is further complemented by a custom tokenizer and bilingual fine-tuning datasets, setting CroissantLLM apart from its predecessors. The research team’s commitment to fostering a high-performance, fully open-sourced bilingual model is evident in their pioneering strategy, emphasizing the importance of equitable language representation in the training process.

The efficacy of CroissantLLM’s methodology is underscored by its performance metrics. The model demonstrates exceptional capability in understanding and generating English and French and sets new benchmarks in bilingual language processing. Its performance, validated through a novel benchmark, FrenchBench, showcases significant improvements over existing monolingual and bilingual models. CroissantLLM achieves this by leveraging a curated dataset containing a French split with manually curated, high-quality, and varied data sources. This approach enables the model to perform equally well in both languages, a feat previously unattained by other models in the field.

The implications of CroissantLLM’s success extend far beyond the confines of academic research. CroissantLLM paves the way for more inclusive and equitable NLP applications by addressing the linguistic bias inherent in previous language models. Its development enriches the NLP landscape by breaking away from the English-centric paradigm and strengthens our understanding of multilingualism in language models. The transparency with which the research team has approached this project, releasing codebases and dozens of checkpoints across various model sizes, training data distributions, and training steps, further amplifies the model’s impact, fostering further research and innovation in large language models.

In essence, CroissantLLM heralds a new era in bilingual language model training, embodying the principles of diversity and inclusivity. Its balanced approach to English and French training, combined with the release of a comprehensive training dataset and performance benchmarks, illustrates the potential of bilingual models in bridging linguistic divides. As we progress, the insights gleaned from CroissantLLM’s development and evaluation will undoubtedly inspire future endeavors in multilingual NLP, driving progress toward more globally accessible and equitable language technologies.

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