Adapters for Altering LLM Vocabularies: What Languages Benefit the Most?

Vocabulary adaptation, which integrates new vocabulary into pre-trained language models, enables expansion to new languages and mitigates token over-fragmentation. However, existing approaches are limited by their reliance on heuristics or external embeddings. We propose VocADT, a novel method for vocabulary adaptation using adapter modules that are trained to learn the optimal linear combination of existing embeddings while keeping the model's weights fixed. VocADT offers a flexible and scalable solution without depending on external resources or language constraints. Across 11 languages-with diverse scripts, resource availability, and fragmentation-we demonstrate that VocADT outperforms the original Mistral model and other baselines across various multilingual tasks including natural language understanding and machine translation. We find that Latin-script languages and highly fragmented languages benefit the most from vocabulary adaptation. We further fine-tune the adapted model on the generative task of machine translation and find that vocabulary adaptation is still beneficial after fine-tuning and that VocADT is the most effective.

@article{han2025_2410.09644,
  title={ Adapters for Altering LLM Vocabularies: What Languages Benefit the Most? },
  author={ HyoJung Han and Akiko Eriguchi and Haoran Xu and Hieu Hoang and Marine Carpuat and Huda Khayrallah },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.09644},
  year={ 2025 }
}