Challenge: Instruction tuning has advanced large language models (LLMs) but its application in lower-resource languages faces challenges due to the imbalanced foundational abilities of LLMs across different languages.
Approach: They propose a pivot language guided generation approach that utilizes a high-resource language as the pivot to enhance instruction tuning in lower-resourced languages.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves instruction-following abilities of LLMs by 29% on average compared to directly responding in the target language alone.

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PROM: Pivoted and Regulated Optimization for Multilingual Instruction Learning (2025.naacl-short)

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Challenge: Existing solutions to large language models (LLMs) are English-centric, hindering their application to 6500+ existing languages.
Approach: They propose to append English tuning data with its translated pair to solve this problem . they identify English as an internal pivot language and propose to regulate between them .
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X-Instruction: Aligning Language Model in Low-resource Languages with Self-curated Cross-lingual Instructions (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models respond well in high-resource languages but struggle in low-resourced languages.
Approach: They propose a method to construct cross-lingual instruction following samples with instruction in English and response in low-resource languages.
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CC-Tuning: A Cross-Lingual Connection Mechanism for Improving Joint Multilingual Supervised Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing fine-tuning approaches that focus on English-centric training corpora often introduce implicit cross-lingual alignment, overlooking the potential for more profound, latent-level cross-linguistic interactions.
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Okapi: Instruction-tuned Large Language Models in Multiple Languages with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (2023.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Existing instruction-tuned open-source LLMs have only been instruction- tuned for English and a few popular languages, thus hindering their accessibility to many other languages in the world.
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Investigating Multilingual Instruction-Tuning: Do Polyglot Models Demand for Multilingual Instructions? (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a study of multilingual pre-trained LLMs on parallel instruction-tuning benchmarks shows that instruction-following models can be used across languages by up to 9.9%.
Approach: They conduct an extensive study of the performance of multilingual pre-trained LLMs instruction-tuned on parallel instruction-uning datasets.
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Monolingual or Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Which Makes a Better Alpaca (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Foundational large language models (LLMs) can be instruction-tuned to perform open-domain question answering, facilitating applications like chat assistants.
Approach: They employ a dataset and machine translations of it to form multilingual data and use it to tune LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed model is on par or better than a model for each language, and multilingual tuning with downsampled data is as powerful and robust.
From English to Second Language Mastery: Enhancing LLMs with Cross-Lingual Continued Instruction Tuning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire strong language skills through extensive pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instructionresponse pairs.
Approach: They propose a method which leverages translation-based parallel instruction data to enhance cross-lingual adaptability.
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Multilingual Instruction Tuning With Just a Pinch of Multilinguality (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Using multilingual instruction tuning, large language models can be used to follow instructions in multiple languages . a multilingual model can be tuned on a wide range of languages, yet most datasets are limited to English .
Approach: They investigate how multilinguality during instruction tuning affects instruction-following across languages . they find that only 40 multilingual examples improve multilingual instruction- follow .
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Plug-in and Fine-tuning: Bridging the Gap between Small Language Models and Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are renowned for their extensive linguistic knowledge and strong generalization capabilities, but their high computational demands make them unsuitable for resource-constrained environments.
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MAPLE: Multilingual Evaluation of Parameter Efficient Finetuning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Prior work on multilingual evaluation has shown that there is a large gap between the performance of Large Language Models on English and other languages.
Approach: They propose to finetune Llama-2 and Mistral models on two datasets to determine their effect on model performance on six downstream tasks covering forty one languages.
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