arXiv · 2605.15613
Toward LLMs Beyond English-Centric Development
Abstract
Through an analysis of sequences generated by open-weight large language models (LLMs), we demonstrate that LLMs are heavily biased toward English. While continual pre-training is commonly used to adapt LLMs to a target language, we show that it does not offer a cost advantage over training from scratch, even for improving cultural understanding in the target language. These findings suggest that dedicated per-language investment may become increasingly important for future LLM development, rather than relying primarily on the expansion of English-centric resources.
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Sho Takase, Ukyo Honda. 2026-05-15. Toward LLMs Beyond English-Centric Development. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15613
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