Cabrita: closing the gap for foreign languages
Celio Larcher Marcos Piau Paulo Finardi Pedro Gengo Piero Esposito Vinicius Caridá
The strategy of training the model from scratch in a specific language or
domain serves two essential purposes: i) enhancing performance in the
particular linguistic or domain context, and ii) ensuring effective
tokenization. The main limitation inherent to this approach lies in the
associated cost, which can reach six to seven-digit dollar values, depending on
the model size and the number of parameters involved.
  The main solution to overcome the cost challenge is to rely on available
pre-trained models, which, despite recent advancements such as the LLaMA and
LLaMA-2 models, still demonstrate inefficiency for certain specific domain
problems or prove ineffective in scenarios involving conversational memory
resources, given the large number of tokens required to represent text.
  To overcome this issue, we present a methodology named Cabrita, which, as our
research demonstrates, successfully addresses the performance and efficient
tokenization problem, all at an affordable cost. We believe that this
methodology can be applied to any transformer-like architecture model. To
validate the study, we conducted continuous pre-training exclusively using
Portuguese text on a 3-billion-parameter model known as OpenLLaMA, resulting in
a model named openCabrita 3B. The openCabrita 3B also features a new tokenizer
that results in a significant reduction in the number of tokens required to
represent the text. In our assessment, for few-shot learning tasks, we achieved
similar results with this 3B model compared to a traditional continuous
pre-training approach as well as to 7B models English pre-trained models.