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Sailor: Open Language Models for South-East Asia (2404.03608v1)

Published 4 Apr 2024 in cs.CL and cs.AI

Abstract: We present Sailor, a family of open LLMs ranging from 0.5B to 7B parameters, tailored for South-East Asian (SEA) languages. These models are continually pre-trained from Qwen1.5, a great LLM for multilingual use cases. From Qwen1.5, Sailor models accept 200B to 400B tokens, primarily covering the languages of English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Malay, and Lao. The training leverages several techniques, including BPE dropout for improving the model robustness, aggressive data cleaning and deduplication, and small proxy models to optimize data mixture. Experimental results on four typical tasks indicate that Sailor models demonstrate strong performance across different benchmarks, including commonsense reasoning, question answering, reading comprehension and examination. Embracing the open-source spirit, we share our insights through this report to spark a wider interest in developing LLMs for multilingual use cases.

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An Analysis of "Sailor: Open LLMs for South-East Asia"

The paper "Sailor: Open LLMs for South-East Asia" introduces the Sailor series of open LLMs, ranging from 0.5 billion to 7 billion parameters, specifically crafted for the South-East Asian (SEA) linguistic landscape. These models extend the Qwen1.5 architecture, incorporating a corpus covering English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Malay, and Lao languages. The focus of the research lies in developing robust multilingual models capable of enhanced performance across multiple SEA languages through continual pre-training.

The researchers tackle several challenges in multilingual model development. They highlight the limitations encountered due to the "curse of multilinguality", where the predominance of English data in existing models leads to underperforming capabilities in non-English languages. Sailor leverages multiple strategic techniques, such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) dropout for improved robustness, aggressive data cleaning and deduplication, alongside the simulation of small proxy models to optimize the data mixture.

Experimental Approach

The experimental validations conducted span across key benchmarks involving commonsense reasoning, question-answering, reading comprehension, and examination-like settings. The results demonstrate that Sailor models manifest strong and consistent performance improvements over baseline models like Qwen1.5, suggesting their efficacy in multilingual tasks prevalent in SEA contexts.

A notable dimension of their approach is the focus on data composition and refinement. Extensive processes in data normalization, cleaning, and deduplication were employed to ensure high-quality input data. Their preprocessing pipeline adjusted for language-specific nuances, showing a removal of 31.11% and 11.16% of data during cleaning and deduplication stages, respectively. This meticulous curation yielded the SailCraft dataset, which was instrumental in enriching the continual pre-training outcomes of Sailor models.

Analytical Insights

The insights drawn from their development process are particularly informative. The use of BPE dropout was fundamental in enhancing model robustness, mitigating issues such as vulnerability to minor input variations—an aspect often overlooked in modeling. Additionally, their ablation studies utilizing smaller proxy models provided empirical evidence reinforcing the efficacy of particular strategies like data mixture optimization and careful hyperparameter tuning.

The research reiterates that embedding a blend of document-level and word-level code-switching techniques can bolster model adaptability in handling mixed language content—a common attribute in SEA linguistic environments. However, they acknowledge the potential of word-level code-switching led to marginal benefits alone, underscoring the nuanced nature of these interventions.

Implications and Future Directions

This paper underlines the importance of tailored LLMs for the increasingly digital communications ecosystem across SEA, a region marked by linguistic diversity. Practically, Sailor models offer a substantial uplift in accessibility and usability of AI-driven language technologies in this part of the world.

Looking forward, the researchers point out several compelling avenues: improving document-friendly deduplication, fostering cross-lingual instruction capabilities, and refining methodologies to cater to code-switching scenarios in language generation tasks. Additionally, increasing the linguistic coverage to incorporate more SEA languages would amplify the impact of such modeling efforts.

In conclusion, "Sailor: Open LLMs for South-East Asia" contributes significantly to the state of the art in multilingual LLM development. The meticulous attention to data quality, combined with innovative training techniques, underpins its advancements. This work represents a meaningful step toward democratizing AI capabilities globally, underscored by its commitment to open-source principles and regional linguistic inclusivity.

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Authors (7)
  1. Longxu Dou (28 papers)
  2. Qian Liu (252 papers)
  3. Guangtao Zeng (14 papers)
  4. Jia Guo (101 papers)
  5. Jiahui Zhou (4 papers)
  6. Wei Lu (325 papers)
  7. Min Lin (96 papers)
Citations (5)
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