Cross-Lingual Alignment of Lugha-Llama with Early-Layer LoRA on Bantu NLI Tasks Versus AfricanLM and MasakhaneLM

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their performance in low-resource languages (LRLs), such as Swahili, often lags due to data scarcity and underrepresentation in pre-training. A key challenge is achieving robust cross-lingual lexical alignment, crucial for tasks like translation and cross-lingual information retrieval. This paper introduces Targeted Lexical Injection (TLI), a novel and efficient fine-tuning approach. We first demonstrate that Lugha-Llama-8B-wura, a Swahili-centric LLM, exhibits strong, near-perfect lexical alignment for Swahili-English

Research goal: How does the cross-lingual alignment performance of Lugha-Llama with early-layer LoRA fine-tuning compare to other low-resource language LLMs like AfricanLM or MasakhaneLM on NLI tasks across Bantu dialects, as measured by accuracy and cross-lingual transfer metrics?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 7.5/10.