Multilingual Fine-Tuning via Localized Gradient Conflict Resolution
About
The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has established cross-lingual versatility as a defining feature of modern systems. However, fine-tuning these models frequently induces negative interference across languages. To address this, we reformulate multilingual fine-tuning as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. Specifically, we introduce Bucket-Level MOO, a scalable distributed framework that applies gradient-based MOO algorithms locally on parameter buckets. This enables conflict-aware updates without the prohibitive communication overhead of reconstructing full gradient vectors. Theoretically, we prove this localized resolution natively enforces Refined Pareto Stationarity, a strictly tighter necessary condition for Pareto optimality. Empirically, Bucket-Level MOO mitigates interference by driving LLMs to construct distinct language-specific dimensions, improving representational separability. Extensive experiments across four base LLMs demonstrate that our method significantly improves both seen and unseen multilingual performance over standard fine-tuning paradigms.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General Multilingual Capability | Aggregate 8 Seen Languages | Average Score69.5 | 20 | |
| General Multilingual Capability | Aggregate 5 Unseen Languages | Average Score75.1 | 20 | |
| Knowledge-Based QA | Global-MMLU-Lite 8 Seen Languages | MMLU Score65.2 | 20 | |
| Knowledge-Based QA | Global-MMLU Lite 5 Unseen Languages | MMLU Score71.9 | 20 | |
| Reasoning | PolyMath 8 Seen Languages | PolyMath Score50 | 20 | |
| Reasoning | PolyMath 5 Unseen Languages | PolyMath Score51.3 | 20 | |
| Machine Reading Comprehension | BELEBELE 8 Seen Languages | BELE Score78.4 | 20 | |
| Machine Reading Comprehension | BELEBELE 5 Unseen Languages | BELE Score83.9 | 20 | |
| Reasoning | Multilingual ARC-E 8 Seen Languages | ARC-E Accuracy85.4 | 20 | |
| Reasoning | Multilingual ARC-E 5 Unseen Languages | ARC-E Accuracy94 | 20 |