No Optimal Language Set Exists for Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Insights from a Linguistically-Informed Study

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2410.07809v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multilingual instruction tuning (MIT) is challenged by the curse of multilinguality, data scarcity, and high computational cost. A natural hypothesis is that carefully selecting a linguistically diverse set of languages yields universally better models. We test this systematically by evaluating linguistically-informed selection strategies---based on typological, geographical, semantic, and learned features---against random baselines across three model families (mGPT, mT5-xl, BLOOM) and five multilingual benchmarks. Our key negative finding is that no universal language selection strategy emerges in our fixed-budget setting: performance is strongly task- and model-dependent, and adding more languages beyond a modest threshold triggers degr