2025.findings-emnlp.224@ACL

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#1 The Effect of Language Diversity When Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Translation [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: David Stap, Christof Monz

Prior research diverges on language diversity in LLM fine-tuning: Some studies report benefits while others find no advantages. Through controlled fine-tuning experiments across 132 translation directions, we systematically resolve these disparities. We find that expanding language diversity during fine-tuning improves translation quality for both unsupervised and—surprisingly—supervised pairs, despite less diverse models being fine-tuned exclusively on these supervised pairs. However, benefits plateau or decrease beyond a certain diversity threshold. We show that increased language diversity creates more language-agnostic representations. These representational adaptations help explain the improved performance in models fine-tuned with greater diversity.

Subject: EMNLP.2025 - Findings