ELO: Efficient Layer-Specific Optimization for Continual Pretraining of Multilingual LLMs

Abstract: We propose an efficient layer-specific optimization (ELO) method designed to enhance continual pretraining (CP) for specific languages in multilingual LLMs (MLLMs). This approach addresses the common challenges of high computational cost and degradation of source language performance associated with traditional CP. The ELO method consists of two main stages: (1) ELO Pretraining, where a small subset of specific layers, identified in our experiments as the critically important first and last layers, are detached from the original MLLM and trained with the target language. This significantly reduces not only the number of trainable parameters but also the total parameters computed during the forward pass, minimizing GPU memory consumption and accelerating the training process. (2) Layer Alignment, where the newly trained layers are reintegrated into the original model, followed by a brief full fine-tuning step on a small dataset to align the parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that the ELO method achieves a training speedup of up to 6.46 times compared to existing methods, while improving target language performance by up to 6.2\% on qualitative benchmarks and effectively preserving source language (English) capabilities.