Cross-Lingual Supervision improves Large Language Models Pre-training
Andrea Schioppa Xavier Garcia Orhan Firat
The recent rapid progress in pre-training Large Language Models has relied on
using self-supervised language modeling objectives like next token prediction
or span corruption. On the other hand, Machine Translation Systems are mostly
trained using cross-lingual supervision that requires aligned data between
source and target languages. We demonstrate that pre-training Large Language
Models on a mixture of a self-supervised Language Modeling objective and the
supervised Machine Translation objective, therefore including cross-lingual
parallel data during pre-training, yields models with better in-context
learning abilities. As pre-training is a very resource-intensive process and a
grid search on the best mixing ratio between the two objectives is
prohibitively expensive, we propose a simple yet effective strategy to learn it
during pre-training.