<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="yoo-etal-2025-code-switching">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>Code-Switching Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Transfer in LLMs</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Haneul</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Yoo</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Cheonbok</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Park</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Sangdoo</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Yun</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Alice</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Oh</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Hwaran</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Lee</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2025-07</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Wanxiang</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Che</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Joyce</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Nabende</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Ekaterina</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Shutova</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Mohammad</namePart>
            <namePart type="given">Taher</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Pilehvar</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">Vienna, Austria</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-256-5</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>Large language models (LLMs) now exhibit near human-level performance in various tasks, but their performance drops drastically after a handful of high-resource languages due to the imbalance in pre-training data. Inspired by the human process of second language acquisition, particularly code-switching—the practice of language alternation in a conversation—we propose code-switching curriculum learning (CSCL) to enhance cross-lingual transfer for LLMs. CSCL mimics the stages of human language learning by progressively training models with a curriculum consisting of 1) token-level code-switching, 2) sentence-level code-switching, and 3) monolingual corpora. Using Qwen 2 as our underlying model, we demonstrate the efficacy of the CSCL in improving language transfer to Korean, achieving significant performance gains compared to monolingual continual pre-training methods. Ablation studies reveal that both token- and sentence-level code-switching significantly enhance cross-lingual transfer and that curriculum learning amplifies these effects. We also extend our findings into various languages, including Japanese (high-resource) and Indonesian (low-resource), and using two additional models (Gemma 2 and Phi 3.5). We further show that CSCL mitigates spurious correlations between language resources and safety alignment, presenting a robust, efficient framework for more equitable language transfer in LLMs. We observe that CSCL is effective for low-resource settings where high-quality, monolingual corpora for language transfer are hardly available.</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">yoo-etal-2025-code-switching</identifier>
    <identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.407</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.407/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2025-07</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>7816</start>
            <end>7836</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Code-Switching Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Transfer in LLMs
%A Yoo, Haneul
%A Park, Cheonbok
%A Yun, Sangdoo
%A Oh, Alice
%A Lee, Hwaran
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-256-5
%F yoo-etal-2025-code-switching
%X Large language models (LLMs) now exhibit near human-level performance in various tasks, but their performance drops drastically after a handful of high-resource languages due to the imbalance in pre-training data. Inspired by the human process of second language acquisition, particularly code-switching—the practice of language alternation in a conversation—we propose code-switching curriculum learning (CSCL) to enhance cross-lingual transfer for LLMs. CSCL mimics the stages of human language learning by progressively training models with a curriculum consisting of 1) token-level code-switching, 2) sentence-level code-switching, and 3) monolingual corpora. Using Qwen 2 as our underlying model, we demonstrate the efficacy of the CSCL in improving language transfer to Korean, achieving significant performance gains compared to monolingual continual pre-training methods. Ablation studies reveal that both token- and sentence-level code-switching significantly enhance cross-lingual transfer and that curriculum learning amplifies these effects. We also extend our findings into various languages, including Japanese (high-resource) and Indonesian (low-resource), and using two additional models (Gemma 2 and Phi 3.5). We further show that CSCL mitigates spurious correlations between language resources and safety alignment, presenting a robust, efficient framework for more equitable language transfer in LLMs. We observe that CSCL is effective for low-resource settings where high-quality, monolingual corpora for language transfer are hardly available.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.407
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.407/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.407
%P 7816-7836

Markdown (Informal)

[Code-Switching Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Transfer in LLMs](https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.407/) (Yoo et al., Findings 2025)

• Code-Switching Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Transfer in LLMs (Yoo et al., Findings 2025)

ACL

• Haneul Yoo, Cheonbok Park, Sangdoo Yun, Alice Oh, and Hwaran Lee. 2025. Code-Switching Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Transfer in LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 7816–7836, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.