Ban Ma-bao

Yutong Liu, Ziyue Zhang, Ban Ma-bao et al.

Tibetan is a low-resource language with minimal parallel speech corpora spanning its three major dialects-Ü-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham-limiting progress in speech modeling. To address this issue, we propose FMSD-TTS, a few-shot, multi-speaker, multi-dialect text-to-speech framework that synthesizes parallel dialectal speech from limited reference audio and explicit dialect labels. Our method features a novel speaker-dialect fusion module and a Dialect-Specialized Dynamic Routing Network (DSDR-Net) to capture fine-grained acoustic and linguistic variations across dialects while preserving speaker identity. Extensive objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that FMSD-TTS significantly outperforms baselines in both dialectal expressiveness and speaker similarity. We further validate the quality and utility of the synthesized speech through a challenging speech-to-speech dialect conversion task. Our contributions include: (1) a novel few-shot TTS system tailored for Tibetan multi-dialect speech synthesis, (2) the public release of a large-scale synthetic Tibetan speech corpus generated by FMSD-TTS, and (3) an open-source evaluation toolkit for standardized assessment of speaker similarity, dialect consistency, and audio quality.

Cheng Huang, Fan Gao, Yutong Liu et al.

Advancement of large language models (LLMs) has brought transformative capabilities to NLP, but such progress remains unevenly distributed, especially for low-resource and culturally rich languages like Tibetan. In this paper, we present TIB-STC, the first large-scale, expert-curated, and multi-domain dataset specifically designed to support the development and evaluation of LLMs for the Tibetan language. Spanning over 11 billion tokens across literature, religion, medicine, law, and daily communication, TIB-STC preserves traditional grammar and stylistic richness. To validate its utility, we train a reference model, Sun-Shine, on TIB-STC through a three-stage pipeline involving pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization. Evaluation on TLUE Benchmark for Tibetan-specific tasks, including Ti-MMLU and Ti-SafetyBench, demonstrates the TIB-STC's effectiveness in enabling robust instruction-following and culturally aligned generation. We release TIB-STC to advance research in low-resource language modeling and promote inclusivity in multilingual NLP. All data are available: https://github.com/Vicentvankor/sun-shine.

Fan Gao, Cheng Huang, Nyima Tashi et al.

To address the severe data scarcity in Tibetan, a low-resource language spoken by over six million people, we introduce TIBSTC-CoT, the large-scale, multi-domain Tibetan dataset automatically constructed via chain-of-thought prompting with large language models (LLMs). TIBSTC-CoT establishes a scalable and reproducible framework for dataset creation in low-resource settings, covering diverse domains and reasoning patterns essential for language understanding and generation. Building on this dataset, we develop the Sunshine-thinking LLM family, a series of Tibetan-centric LLMs equipped with chain-of-thought capabilities. Trained entirely on TIBSTC-CoT, Sunshine-thinking has demonstrated strong reasoning and generation performance, comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) multilingual LLMs. Our work marks a significant step toward inclusive AI by enabling high-quality Tibetan language processing through both resource creation and model innovation. All data are available: https://github.com/Vicentvankor/sun-shine.

Fan Gao, Cheng Huang, Nyima Tashi et al.

Large language models have made tremendous progress in recent years, but low-resource languages, like Tibetan, remain significantly underrepresented in their evaluation. Despite Tibetan being spoken by over seven million people, it has largely been neglected in the development and assessment of large language models. To address this gap, we present a \textbf{T}ibetan \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{U}nderstanding \textbf{E}valuation Benchmark, \textbf{TLUE}, the first large-scale benchmark for measuring the proficiency of LLMs in the Tibetan language. \textbf{TLUE} comprises two major components: a comprehensive multi-task understanding benchmark spanning 5 domains and 67 subdomains, and a safety benchmark encompassing 7 subdomains. Then, we evaluate a diverse set of state-of-the-art large language models. Experimental results demonstrate that most large language models perform below the random baseline, highlighting the considerable challenges they face in Tibetan language processing. \textbf{TLUE} provides a crucial foundation for advancing future research in Tibetan language understanding and highlights the importance of promoting greater inclusivity in the development of large language models.

Yutong Liu, Ziyue Zhang, Ban Ma-bao et al.

Tibetan is a low-resource language with limited parallel speech corpora spanning its three major dialects (Ü-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham), limiting progress in speech modeling. To address this issue, we propose TMD-TTS, a unified Tibetan multi-dialect text-to-speech (TTS) framework that synthesizes parallel dialectal speech from explicit dialect labels. Our method features a dialect fusion module and a Dialect-Specialized Dynamic Routing Network (DSDR-Net) to capture fine-grained acoustic and linguistic variations across dialects. Extensive objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that TMD-TTS significantly outperforms baselines in dialectal expressiveness. We further validate the quality and utility of the synthesized speech through a challenging Speech-to-Speech Dialect Conversion (S2SDC) task.

Cheng Huang, Nyima Tashi, Fan Gao et al.

Tibetan, one of the major low-resource languages in Asia, presents unique linguistic and sociocultural characteristics that pose both challenges and opportunities for AI research. Despite increasing interest in developing AI systems for underrepresented languages, Tibetan has received limited attention due to a lack of accessible data resources, standardized benchmarks, and dedicated tools. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the current state of Tibetan AI in the AI domain, covering textual and speech data resources, NLP tasks, machine translation, speech recognition, and recent developments in LLMs. We systematically categorize existing datasets and tools, evaluate methods used across different tasks, and compare performance where possible. We also identify persistent bottlenecks such as data sparsity, orthographic variation, and the lack of unified evaluation metrics. Additionally, we discuss the potential of cross-lingual transfer, multi-modal learning, and community-driven resource creation. This survey aims to serve as a foundational reference for future work on Tibetan AI research and encourages collaborative efforts to build an inclusive and sustainable AI ecosystem for low-resource languages.