Early-Layer vs. Late-Layer LoRA Fine-Tuning for Cross-Lingual NLI in Low-Resource African Languages

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 early-layer LoRA fine-tuning with TLI compare to late-layer LoRA fine-tuning in terms of cross-lingual natural language inference accuracy on the XNLI benchmark for severely low-resource African languages?

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