English is Not All You Need: Systematically Exploring the Role of Multilinguality in LLM Post-Training
For LLM developers, this provides actionable insights to improve multilingual performance by incorporating diverse languages in post-training, challenging the English-centric norm.
The paper systematically studies how multilingual post-training affects LLM performance across languages, finding that even minimal multilinguality improves both English and cross-lingual performance, with low-resource languages benefiting most.
Despite the widespread multilingual deployment of large language models, post-training pipelines remain predominantly English-centric, contributing to performance disparities across languages. We present a systematic, controlled study of the interplay between training language coverage, model scale, and task domain, based on 220 supervised fine-tuning runs on parallel translated multilingual data mixtures spanning mathematical reasoning and API calling tasks, with models up to 8B parameters. We find that increasing language coverage during post-training is largely beneficial across tasks and model scales, with low-resource languages benefiting the most and high-resource languages plateauing rather than degrading. Even minimal multilinguality helps: incorporating a single non-English language improves both English performance and cross-lingual generalization, making English-only post-training largely suboptimal. Moreover, at sufficient language diversity, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer can match or exceed the effects of direct language inclusion in a low-diversity setting, although gains remain limited for typologically distant, low-resource languages.