about
Building a Vietnamese Language Model with Advanced Continual Pre-Training (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Apr 1, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A general-purpose language model gets an extra round of training on Vietnamese text so it picks up the language's quirks and writes more natural, context-aware answers. It beat other Vietnamese-focused models on classification, question answering, and writing, topping a Vietnamese understanding test.

Abstract · Vi-Mistral-X: Building a Vietnamese Language Model with Advanced Continual Pre-training

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly transformed the field of natural language processing, although the focus on English-centric models has created a noticeable research gap for specific languages, including Vietnamese. To address this issue, this paper presents vi-mistral-x, an innovative Large Language Model designed expressly for the Vietnamese language. It utilizes a unique method of continual pre-training, based on the Mistral architecture, which incorporates grouped-query attention and sliding window attention techniques. This model, vi-Mistral-X, marks a significant step forward in improving the understanding and generation of the Vietnamese language. It introduces an additional phase of continual pre-training, specifically adapted for Vietnamese, enhancing the model's capability in understanding complex language nuances and generating accurate, context-aware Vietnamese text. Through comprehensive testing on various benchmarks, vi-mistral-x has shown to outperform existing Vietnamese LLMs in several key areas, including text classification, question answering, and text generation. Particularly, in the Vietnamese Multitask Language Understanding (VMLU) benchmark, vi-mistral-x sets a new standard, outperforming other available models significantly. This paper highlights the critical role of continual pre-training in advancing language-specific LLMs and opens new avenues for the development of multilingual models. We aim for vi-mistral-x to not just be an important asset for processing the Vietnamese language but also to encourage more advancements in creating large language models for languages that are less represented.

James Vo
arXiv:2403.15470 · cs.CL · submitted Mar 20, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · The model is currently under development

add comment on HN