Raising Bars, Not Parameters: LilMoo Compact Language Model for Hindi

While the NLP landscape is dominated by multi-billion parameter architectures, their deployment in low-resource, non-Latin scripts remains computationally prohibitive for edge configurations, mobile systems, and decentralized local hardware. This paper presents bangla-smollm-135m, a highly compact 135-million parameter decoder-only foundational model engineered explicitly for high-efficiency language modeling in the Bangla script. By leveraging a deterministic intersect-and-append token merging strategy between TituLLMs and SmolLM2-135M, the model overcomes subword script fragmentation without destabilizing early pretrained parameter states. In zero-shot multi-task benchmark evaluations (PIQA_bn, OpenBookQA_bn, CommonsenseQA_bn, and Bangla_MMLU), bangla-smollm-135m matches or outperforms models twice its size (Gemma-3-270m) and achieves parity with models in the 1B parameter tier. The model is available at rnnandi/bangla-smollm-135m

Tiny Aya redefines what a small multilingual language model can achieve. Trained on 70 languages and refined through region-aware posttraining, it delivers state-of-the-art in translation quality, strong multilingual understanding, and high-quality target-language generation, all with just 3.35B parameters. The release includes a pretrained foundation model, a globally balanced instruction-tuned variant, and three region-specialized models targeting languages from Africa, South Asia, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and West Asia. This report details the training strategy, data composition, and comprehensive evaluation framework behind Tiny Aya, and presents an alternative scaling path for multilingual AI: one centered on efficiency, balanced performance across languages, and practical deployment.

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~($Δ_{\text{post}}$) 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.