A Data-Efficient Path to Multilingual LLMs: Language Expansion via Post-training PARAMDelta Integration into Upcycled MoE

arXiv:2605.18083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Expanding Large Language Models~(LLMs) to new languages is a costly endeavor, demanding extensive Continued Pre-Training~(CPT) and data-intensive alignment. While recent data-free merging techniques attempt to bypass alignment by fusing a multilingual CPT-enhanced model with its instruct counterpart, they are plagued by a critical trade-off: mitigating parameter conflicts to preserve original abilities inevitably dilutes new language acquisition, and vice-versa. To resolve this conflict, we introduce method, which upcycles a dense model into a Mixture-of-Experts~(MoE) architecture, allocating different experts to different languages. Alignment ability is then transferred by grafting a MoE-expanded parameter delta~(Delta_{ext{post}}) to the CPT-enhanced base model, bypassing the complex alignment phase. Experiments demonstrate method's superiority even against baselines with similar FLOPs or number of parameters; it improves performance on expanded languages while effectively preserving original capabilities. We further show our approach is highly applicable across different models and Post-training deltas.

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-05-19