Towards Cultural Bridge by Bahnaric-Vietnamese Translation Using Transfer Learning of Sequence-To-Sequence Pre-training Language Model

Dat Minh Tran Phan; Khang Nhat Hoang Vo; Tho Thanh Quan

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2505.11421

Towards Cultural Bridge by Bahnaric-Vietnamese Translation Using Transfer Learning of Sequence-To-Sequence Pre-training Language Model

Dat Minh Tran Phan·Khang Nhat Hoang Vo·Tho Thanh Quan

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

This work explores the journey towards achieving Bahnaric-Vietnamese translation for the sake of culturally bridging the two ethnic groups in Vietnam. However, translating from Bahnaric to Vietnamese also encounters some difficulties. The most prominent challenge is the lack of available original Bahnaric resources source language, including vocabulary, grammar, dialogue patterns and bilingual corpus, which hinders the data collection process for training. To address this, we leverage a transfer learning approach using sequence-to-sequence pre-training language model. First of all, we leverage a pre-trained Vietnamese language model to capture the characteristics of this language. Especially, to further serve the purpose of machine translation, we aim for a sequence-to-sequence model, not encoder-only like BERT or decoder-only like GPT. Taking advantage of significant similarity between the two languages, we continue training the model with the currently limited bilingual resources of Vietnamese-Bahnaric text to perform the transfer learning from language model to machine translation. Thus, this approach can help to handle the problem of imbalanced resources between two languages, while also optimizing the training and computational processes. Additionally, we also enhanced the datasets using data augmentation to generate additional resources and defined some heuristic methods to help the translation more precise. Our approach has been validated to be highly effective for the Bahnaric-Vietnamese translation model, contributing to the expansion and preservation of languages, and facilitating better mutual understanding between the two ethnic people.

Explore related subjects

cs.CL

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Dat Minh Tran Phan, Khang Nhat Hoang Vo, Tho Thanh Quan. 2026-07-27. Towards Cultural Bridge by Bahnaric-Vietnamese Translation Using Transfer Learning of Sequence-To-Sequence Pre-training Language Model. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11421

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

LiSeCo: Linear Semantic Control for Language Generation

The prevalence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in critical applications highlights the need for controlled language generation methods that are both computationally efficient and enjoy performance guarantees. To address this need, we use a common model of concept semantics as linearly represented in an LLM's latent space. In particular, we take the view that natural language generation traces a trajectory in this continuous semantic space, realized by the language model's hidden activations. This view permits a control-theoretic treatment of text generation in latent space, in which we propose Linear Semantic Control (LiSeCo), a lightweight, gradient-free intervention that dynamically steers trajectories away from regions corresponding to undesired meanings. In particular, we propose to directly intervene, in an online fashion, the activations of the token that is being generated in embedding space. Crucially, LiSeCo does not simply steer activations towards a desirable region. Instead, it relies on classical techniques from control theory to precisely control activations in a context-dependent way, and guarantees that they are brought into a specific pre-defined region of embedding space that corresponds to allowed semantics. The intervention is computed in closed form according to an optimal controller formulation, minimally impacting generation time. This control of the activations in embedding space allows for fine-grained steering of attributes of the generated sequence. We demonstrate that our approach is effective on different tasks -- toxicity, sentiment, and language (English/Spanish) steering -- while maintaining text quality.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

VMMU: A Vietnamese Multitask Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark

We introduce VMMU, a Vietnamese Multitask Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark designed to evaluate how vision-language models (VLMs) interpret and reason over visual and textual information beyond English. VMMU consists of 2.5k multimodal questions across 7 tasks, covering a diverse range of problem contexts, including STEM problem solving, data interpretation, rule-governed visual reasoning, and abstract visual reasoning. All questions require genuine multimodal integration, rather than reliance on text-only cues or OCR-based shortcuts. We evaluate a diverse set of state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source VLMs on VMMU. Despite strong Vietnamese OCR performance, proprietary models achieve only 66% mean accuracy. Further analysis shows that the primary source of failure is not OCR, but instead multimodal grounding and reasoning over text and visual evidence. Code and data are available at https://vmmu-bench.github.io/

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

RapidUn: Influence-Driven Parameter Reweighting for Efficient Large Language Model Unlearning

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) remains challenging because full retraining is costly, while approximate methods often struggle to remove targeted behaviors without degrading retained utility, especially under limited post-deployment supervision. We consider a practical PEFT setting for targeted behavioral contamination removal with a small forget set, a limited retain buffer, and LoRA-only updates, and propose RapidUn, an influence-guided framework that converts cross-sample influence estimates into fixed sample-specific weights for weighted LoRA unlearning. Across Llama-3-8B on Dolly-15k and Alpaca-57k, with cross-model validation on Mistral-7B + Dolly-15k, RapidUn achieves lower seen-trigger and OOD-trigger-family ASR than Fisher, GA, and LoReUn while maintaining competitive clean utility. On Llama-3-8B + Alpaca-57k, it achieves a 77x wall-clock speedup over the clean-corpus LoRA retraining reference. Complementary TOFU, semantic LLM-judge, and IFEval evaluations further support the effectiveness of influence-guided sample reweighting beyond the controlled trigger benchmark.

cs.CL↗