Rethinking Multilingual Continual Pretraining: Data Mixing for Adapting LLMs Across Languages and Resources

Zihao Li, Shaoxiong Ji, Hengyu Luo, Jörg Tiedemann

Keywords: Multilingual continual pretraining, data mixing

TL;DR: This study evaluates 36 continual pretraining configurations across three multilingual LLMs and 30+ languages, analyzing their effects across resource levels and language behavior categories.

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant disparities in performance across languages, primarily benefiting high-resource languages while marginalizing underrepresented ones. Continual Pretraining (CPT) has emerged as a promising approach to address this imbalance, although the relative effectiveness of monolingual, bilingual, and code-augmented data strategies remains unclear. This study systematically evaluates 36 CPT configurations involving three multilingual base models, across 30+ languages categorized as altruistic, selfish, and stagnant, spanning various resource levels. Our findings reveal three major insights: (1) Bilingual CPT improves multilingual classification but often causes language mixing issues during generation. (2) Including programming code data during CPT consistently enhances multilingual classification accuracy and language modeling capabilities, particularly benefiting low-resource languages, but introduces a trade-off by slightly degrading generation quality. (3) Contrary to prior work, we observe substantial deviations from language classifications according to their impact on cross-lingual transfer: Languages classified as altruistic often negatively affect related languages, selfish languages show conditional and configuration-dependent behavior, and stagnant languages demonstrate surprising adaptability under certain CPT conditions. These nuanced interactions emphasize the complexity of multilingual representation learning, underscoring the importance of systematic studies on generalizable language classification to inform future multilingual CPT strategies.

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Submission Number: 438