BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer
Paper · 2024 · Akari Asai, Sneha Kudugunta, Xinyan Yu et al.
Summary
Research on few-shot learning with large language models has focused mostly on English. It has remained unclear how in-context learning (ICL) compares with fine-tuning when only a few target-language examples are available. The authors present BUFFET, a benchmark whose name refers to evaluating few-shot transfer under one unified format. It converts 15 tasks into a single text-to-text format with instructions and fixed few-shot training and validation splits. The tasks span classification, structured prediction such as NER, and generation such as summarization and question generation, across 54 languages. The data mixes translation-based datasets with datasets annotated natively in each language, and it includes many under-represented languages. Ten models, including mT5, mT0, BLOOM, BLOOMZ, ChatGPT, Llama-2 and Mistral, are evaluated with both ICL and fine-tuning. With the same number of target-language examples, large models using ICL often fall behind a much smaller fine-tuned mT5-base, especially in low-resource languages. However, LLMs perform better on generative tasks. The resource matters because it enables fair, reproducible comparisons of cross-lingual transfer methods beyond English.
Key points
- Scale and diversity: BUFFET-Full spans 15 tasks and 54 languages from 24 language families, and 36 of these languages are not Indo-European. BUFFET-Light is a cheaper subset that keeps task and language variety.
- Fixed few-shot samples: Each task ships with three fixed k-shot training/validation sets (e.g., k=32), counted per class for classification tasks. Results are aggregated across these sets to reduce variance.
- Source datasets: These include XLSUM, TyDi QA (QA and question generation), XNLI, AmericasNLI, ParsiNLU, OCNLI, KLUE-NLI, PAWS-X, IndicNLU sentiment, Amazon Review, XCOPA, XWinograd, WikiANN and MasakhaNER.
- Effect of demonstrations: Which few-shot examples are chosen affects ICL results more strongly than how the instructions are worded. Instruction-tuned models often make poor use of demonstrations. English-centric Llama-2 and Mistral do well in high-resource languages but drop sharply elsewhere.
- Human evaluation of question generation: Outputs scored well in English but poorly in Telugu. BLOOMZ reached only 56.0% grammatical correctness and 40% quality in Telugu, and no Llama-2 Telugu output met either criterion. Target-language instructions were machine-translated with NLLB.
Institutions
📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 9,086 worksArtificial Intelligence · 8,889 worksArts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works
🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP · 467 works
Cite
Cite as Akari Asai, Sneha Kudugunta, Xinyan Yu, Terra Blevins, Hila Gonen, Machel Reid, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sebastian Ruder and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2024. BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers).
@inproceedings{asai2024buffet,
title = {{BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer}},
author = {Akari Asai, Sneha Kudugunta, Xinyan Yu, Terra Blevins, Hila Gonen, Machel Reid, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sebastian Ruder and Hannaneh Hajishirzi},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.100},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.100}
}References
- David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jade Abbott, Graham Neubig, Daniel D’souza, Julia Kreutzer, Constantine Lignos, Chester Palen-Michel, Happy Buzaaba, Shruti Rijhwani, Sebastian Ruder, Stephen Mayhew, Israel Abebe Azime, Shamsuddeen H. Muhammad, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Perez Ogayo, Are…
- Divyanshu Aggarwal, Vivek Gupta, and Anoop Kunchukuttan. 2022. IndicXNLI: Evaluating multilingual inference for Indian languages. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. find
- Priyanka Agrawal, Chris Alberti, Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Ji Ma, Sebastian Ruder, Kuzman Ganchev, Dipanjan Das, and Mirella Lapata. 2022. Qameleon: Multilingual qa with only 5 examples. arXiv preprint. find
- Kabir Ahuja, Rishav Hada, Millicent Ochieng, Prachi Jain, Harshita Diddee, Samuel Maina, Tanuja Ganu, Sameer Segal, Maxamed Axmed, Kalika Bali, et al. 2023. Mega: Multilingual evaluation of generative ai. arXiv preprint.
- Alham Fikri Aji, Genta Indra Winata, Fajri Koto, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Ade Romadhony, Rahmad Mahendra, Kemal Kurniawan, David Moeljadi, Radityo Eko Prasojo, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau, and Sebastian Ruder. 2022. One country, 700+ languages: NLP challenges for underrepresented languages and dialects… find
- Mikel Artetxe, Sebastian Ruder, Dani Yogatama, Gorka Labaka, and Eneko Agirre. 2020. A call for more rigor in unsupervised cross-lingual learning. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics. find
- Venkat Arun and Hari Balakrishnan. 2018. Copa: Practical Delay-Based congestion control for the internet. In USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. find
- Akari Asai, Jungo Kasai, Jonathan Clark, Kenton Lee, Eunsol Choi, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2021. XOR QA: Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering. In Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Stephen H Bach, Victor Sanh, Zheng-Xin Yong, Albert Webson, Colin Raffel, Nihal V Nayak, Abheesht Sharma, Taewoon Kim, M Saiful Bari, Thibault Fevry, et al. 2022. Promptsource: An integrated development environment and repository for natural language prompts. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of…
- Yejin Bang, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Nayeon Lee, Wenliang Dai, Dan Su, Bryan Wilie, Holy Lovenia, Ziwei Ji, Tiezheng Yu, Willy Chung, et al. 2023. A multi-task, multilingual, multimodal evaluation of chatgpt on reasoning, hallucination, and interactivity. arXiv preprint. find
- Iz Beltagy, Arman Cohan, Robert Logan IV, Sewon Min, and Sameer Singh. 2022. Zero- and few-shot NLP with pretrained language models. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts. find
- Damian Blasi, Antonios Anastasopoulos, and Graham Neubig. 2022. Systematic inequalities in language technology performance across the world’s languages. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Terra Blevins and Luke Zettlemoyer. 2022a. Language contamination helps explains the cross-lingual capabilities of english pretrained models. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3563–3574. find
- Terra Blevins and Luke Zettlemoyer. 2022b. Language contamination helps explains the cross-lingual capabilities of English pretrained models. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. find
- Eleftheria Briakou, Colin Cherry, and George Foster. 2023. Searching for needles in a haystack: On the role of incidental bilingualism in PaLM’s translation capability. In ACL. find
- Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, et al. 2020. Language models are few-shot learners. In Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
- Hyung Won Chung, Le Hou, Shayne Longpre, Barret Zoph, Yi Tay, William Fedus, Eric Li, Xuezhi Wang, Mostafa Dehghani, Siddhartha Brahma, et al. 2022. Scaling instruction-finetuned language models. arXiv preprint.
- Jonathan H. Clark, Eunsol Choi, Michael Collins, Dan Garrette, Tom Kwiatkowski, Vitaly Nikolaev, and Jennimaria Palomaki. 2020. TyDi QA: A benchmark for information-seeking question answering in typologically diverse languages. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Alexis Conneau, Kartikay Khandelwal, Naman Goyal, Vishrav Chaudhary, Guillaume Wenzek, Francisco Guzmán, Edouard Grave, Myle Ott, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Veselin Stoyanov. 2020a. Unsupervised cross-lingual representation learning at scale. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistic… find
- Or Honovich, Thomas Scialom, Omer Levy, and Timo Schick. 2022. Unnatural instructions: Tuning language models with (almost) no human labor. arXiv preprint.
- Hai Hu, Kyle Richardson, Liang Xu, Lu Li, Sandra Kübler, and Lawrence Moss. 2020a. OCNLI: Original Chinese Natural Language Inference. In Proceedings of Findings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
- Alexis Conneau, Ruty Rinott, Guillaume Lample, Adina Williams, Samuel Bowman, Holger Schwenk, and Veselin Stoyanov. 2018. XNLI: Evaluating cross-lingual sentence representations. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. find
- Junjie Hu, Sebastian Ruder, Aditya Siddhant, Graham Neubig, Orhan Firat, and Melvin Johnson. 2020b. Xtreme: A massively multilingual multi-task benchmark for evaluating cross-lingual generalisation. In Proceedings of the International Conference of Machine Learning. find
- Alexis Conneau, Shijie Wu, Haoran Li, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Veselin Stoyanov. 2020b. Emerging cross-lingual structure in pretrained language models. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Haoyang Huang, Tianyi Tang, Dongdong Zhang, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ting Song, Yan Xia, and Furu Wei. 2023. Not all languages are created equal in llms: Improving multilingual capability by cross-lingual-thought prompting. arXiv preprint.
- Marta R Costa-jussà, James Cross, Onur Çelebi, Maha Elbayad, Kenneth Heafield, Kevin Heffernan, Elahe Kalbassi, Janice Lam, Daniel Licht, Jean Maillard, et al. 2022. No language left behind: Scaling human-centered machine translation. arXiv preprint. find
- Albert Q Jiang, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Arthur Mensch, Chris Bamford, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Diego de las Casas, Florian Bressand, Gianna Lengyel, Guillaume Lample, Lucile Saulnier, et al. 2023. Mistral 7b. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.06825. find
- Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. 2019. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Divyanshu Kakwani, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Satish Golla, Gokul N.C., Avik Bhattacharyya, Mitesh M. Khapra, and Pratyush Kumar. 2020. IndicNLPSuite: Monolingual corpora, evaluation benchmarks and pre-trained multilingual language models for Indian languages. In Proceedings of Findings of Empirical Method…
- Abteen Ebrahimi, Manuel Mager, Arturo Oncevay, Vishrav Chaudhary, Luis Chiruzzo, Angela Fan, John Ortega, Ricardo Ramos, Annette Rios, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, Gustavo Giménez-Lugo, Elisabeth Mager, Graham Neubig, Alexis Palmer, Rolando Coto-Solano, Thang Vu, and Katharina Kann. 2022. AmericasNLI: E…
- Tanya Goyal, Junyi Jessy Li, and Greg Durrett. 2022. News summarization and evaluation in the era of gpt-3. arXiv preprint. find
- Tahmid Hasan, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Md. Saiful Islam, Kazi Mubasshir, Yuan-Fang Li, Yong-Bin Kang, M. Sohel Rahman, and Rifat Shahriyar. 2021. XL-sum: Large-scale multilingual abstractive summarization for 44 languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics. find
- Michael A. Hedderich, David Adelani, Dawei Zhu, Jesujoba Alabi, Udia Markus, and Dietrich Klakow. 2020. Transfer learning and distant supervision for multilingual transformer models: A study on African Phillip Keung, Yichao Lu, György Szarvas, and Noah A. Smith. 2020. The multilingual Amazon reviews…
- Daniel Khashabi, Arman Cohan, Siamak Shakeri, Pedram Hosseini, Pouya Pezeshkpour, Malihe Alikhani, Moin Aminnaseri, Marzieh Bitaab, Faeze Brahman, Sarik Ghazarian, Mozhdeh Gheini, Arman Kabiri, Rabeeh Karimi Mahabagdi, Omid Memarrast, Ahmadreza Mosallanezhad, Erfan Noury, Shahab Raji, Mohammad Sadeg… find
- Anne Lauscher, Vinit Ravishankar, Ivan Vulić, and Goran Glavaš. 2020. From zero to hero: On the limitations of zero-shot language transfer with multilingual Transformers. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
- Haoran Li, Abhinav Arora, Shuohui Chen, Anchit Gupta, Sonal Gupta, and Yashar Mehdad. 2021. MTOP: A comprehensive multilingual task-oriented semantic parsing benchmark. In Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Long Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, Sandhini Agarwal, Katarina Slama, Alex Ray, et al. 2022. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. In Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
- Yaobo Liang, Nan Duan, Yeyun Gong, Ning Wu, Fenfei Guo, Weizhen Qi, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Guihong Cao, Xiaodong Fan, Ruofei Zhang, Rahul Agrawal, Edward Cui, Sining Wei, Taroon Bharti, Ying Qiao, Jiun-Hung Chen, Winnie Wu, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Daniel Campos, Rangan Majumder, and Mi… find
- Xiaoman Pan, Boliang Zhang, Jonathan May, Joel Nothman, Kevin Knight, and Heng Ji. 2017. Cross-lingual name tagging and linking for 282 languages. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Xi Victoria Lin, Todor Mihaylov, Mikel Artetxe, Tianlu Wang, Shuohui Chen, Daniel Simig, Myle Ott, Naman Goyal, Shruti Bhosale, Jingfei Du, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Sam Shleifer, Punit Singh Koura, Vishrav Chaudhary, Brian O’Horo, Jeff Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Zornitsa Kozareva, Mona Diab, Veselin Stoyano…
- Shayne Longpre, Le Hou, Tu Vu, Albert Webson, Hyung Won Chung, Yi Tay, Denny Zhou, Quoc V Le, Barret Zoph, Jason Wei, et al. 2023. The flan collection: Designing data and methods for effective instruction tuning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.13688.
- Yao Lu, Max Bartolo, Alastair Moore, Sebastian Riedel, and Pontus Stenetorp. 2022. Fantastically ordered prompts and where to find them: Overcoming few-shot prompt order sensitivity. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Sewon Min, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2022a. MetaICL: Learning to learn in context. In Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. find
- Sewon Min, Xinxi Lyu, Ari Holtzman, Mikel Artetxe, Mike Lewis, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Luke Zettlemoyer. 2022b. Rethinking the role of demonstrations: What makes in-context learning work? In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
- Niklas Muennighoff, Thomas Wang, Lintang Sutawika, Adam Roberts, Stella Biderman, Teven Le Scao, M Saiful Bari, Sheng Shen, Zheng-Xin Yong, Hailey Schoelkopf, et al. 2023. Crosslingual generalization through multitask finetuning. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen R Gwadabe, Clara E Rivera, Jonathan H Clark, Sebastian Ruder, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Bonaventure FP Dossou, Abdou Aziz DIOP, Claytone Sikasote, Gilles Hacheme, et al. 2023. Afriqa: Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering for african languages. arXiv preprint arXi… find
- Sungjoon Park, Jihyung Moon, Sungdong Kim, Won Ik Cho, Jiyoon Han, Jangwon Park, Chisung Song, Junseong Kim, Yongsook Song, Taehwan Oh, et al. 2021. Klue: Korean language understanding evaluation. In Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Track on Datasets and Benchmarks. find
- Edoardo Maria Ponti, Goran Glavaš, Olga Majewska, Qianchu Liu, Ivan Vulić, and Anna Korhonen. 2020. XCOPA: A multilingual dataset for causal commonsense reasoning. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
- Chengwei Qin, Aston Zhang, Zhuosheng Zhang, Jiaao Chen, Michihiro Yasunaga, and Diyi Yang. 2023. Is chatgpt a general-purpose natural language processing task solver? arXiv preprint.
- Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Katherine Lee, Sharan Narang, Michael Matena, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, and Peter J. Liu. 2020. Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to-text transformer. In Journal of Machine Learning Research.
- Pranav Rajpurkar, Jian Zhang, Konstantin Lopyrev, and Percy Liang. 2016. SQuAD: 100,000+ questions for machine comprehension of text. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
- Sebastian Ruder, Jonathan H Clark, Alexander Gutkin, Mihir Kale, Min Ma, Massimo Nicosia, Shruti Rijhwani, Parker Riley, Jean-Michel A Sarr, Xinyi Wang, et al. 2023. XTREME-UP: A user-centric scarce-data benchmark for under-represented languages. find
- Sebastian Ruder, Noah Constant, Jan Botha, Aditya Siddhant, Orhan Firat, Jinlan Fu, Pengfei Liu, Junjie Hu, Dan Garrette, Graham Neubig, and Melvin Johnson. 2021. XTREME-R: Towards more challenging and nuanced multilingual evaluation. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processin…
- Teven Le Scao, Angela Fan, Christopher Akiki, Ellie Pavlick, Suzana Ilić, Daniel Hesslow, Roman Castagné, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, François Yvon, Matthias Gallé, et al. 2022. Bloom: A 176b-parameter open-access multilingual language model. arXiv preprint. find
- Timo Schick and Hinrich Schütze. 2021. It’s not just size that matters: Small language models are also few-shot learners. In Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Freda Shi, Mirac Suzgun, Markus Freitag, Xuezhi Wang, Suraj Srivats, Soroush Vosoughi, Hyung Won Chung, Yi Tay, Sebastian Ruder, Denny Zhou, Dipanjan Das, and Jason Wei. 2023. Language models are multilingual chain-of-thought reasoners. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Repr…
- Taylor Shin, Yasaman Razeghi, Robert L Logan IV, Eric Wallace, and Sameer Singh. 2020. Autoprompt: Eliciting knowledge from language models with automatically generated prompts. arXiv preprint.
- Hongjin Su, Jungo Kasai, Chen Henry Wu, Weijia Shi, Tianlu Wang, Jiayi Xin, Rui Zhang, Mari Ostendorf, Luke Zettlemoyer, Noah A Smith, et al. 2022. Selective annotation makes language models better few-shot learners. arXiv preprint. find
- Hugo Touvron, Louis Martin, Kevin Stone, Peter Albert, Amjad Almahairi, Yasmine Babaei, Nikolay Bashlykov, Soumya Batra, Prajjwal Bhargava, Shruti Bhosale, et al. 2023. Llama 2: Open foundation and fine-tuned chat models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09288. find
- Yizhong Wang, Yeganeh Kordi, Swaroop Mishra, Alisa Liu, Noah A Smith, Daniel Khashabi, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2022a. Self-instruct: Aligning language model with self generated instructions. arXiv preprint. find
- Yizhong Wang, Swaroop Mishra, Pegah Alipoormolabashi, Yeganeh Kordi, Amirreza Mirzaei, Atharva Naik, Arjun Ashok, Arut Selvan Dhanasekaran, Anjana Arunkumar, David Stap, Eshaan Pathak, Giannis Karamanolakis, Haizhi Lai, Ishan Purohit, Ishani Mondal, Jacob Anderson, Kirby Kuznia, Krima Doshi, Kuntal… find
- Linting Xue, Noah Constant, Adam Roberts, Mihir Kale, Rami Al-Rfou, Aditya Siddhant, Aditya Barua, and Colin Raffel. 2021. mt5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer. In Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguisti…
- Yinfei Yang, Yuan Zhang, Chris Tar, and Jason Baldridge. 2019. PAWS-X: A cross-lingual adversarial dataset for paraphrase identification. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
- Qinyuan Ye, Bill Yuchen Lin, and Xiang Ren. 2021. CrossFit: A few-shot learning challenge for cross-task generalization in NLP. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. find
- Xinyan Velocity Yu, Trina Chatterjee, Akari Asai, Junjie Hu, and Eunsol Choi. 2022. Beyond counting datasets: A survey of multilingual dataset construction and necessary resources. In Proceedings of Findings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. find
- Yuan Zhang, Jason Baldridge, and Luheng He. 2019. Paws: Paraphrase adversaries from word scrambling. arXiv preprint.
- Mengjie Zhao, Yi Zhu, Ehsan Shareghi, Ivan Vulić, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen, and Hinrich Schütze. 2021. A closer look at few-shot crosslingual transfer: The choice of shots matters. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics. find
- Adina Williams, Nikita Nangia, and Samuel R Bowman. 2017. A broad-coverage challenge corpus for sentence understanding through inference. arXiv preprint. find
- Shijie Wu and Mark Dredze. 2019. Beto, bentz, becas: The surprising cross-lingual effectiveness of BERT. In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
- Dongling Xiao, Han Zhang, Yukun Li, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, and Haifeng Wang. 2021. Ernie-gen: An enhanced multi-flow pre-training and fine-tuning framework for natural language generation. In International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Updated
This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/asai-2024-buffet-benchmarking-large-language-models/