SemanticAlignment/Llama-3.1-8B-Italian-SAVA-instruct

Llama-3.1-8B-Italian-SAVA-instruct

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<img src="https://github.com/Andrew-Wyn/images/blob/master/sava/italian_adapt-img.jpg?raw=true" width="400" height="400" style="border-radius:10%" />

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The Llama-3.1-8B-Adapted collection of large language models (LLMs), is a collection of adapted generative models in 7B (text in/text out), adapted models from Mistral-7B-Base-v0.1.

Llama-3.1-8B-Italian-SAVA-instruct is a continually trained and instruction tuned Llama model. Which vocabulary was inherited from Minerva-3B.

Model developer: SapienzaNLP, ISTI-CNR, ILC-CNR

Model Architecture: Llama-3.1-8B-Adapted is an auto-regressive language model that uses an optimized transformer architecture.

Data used for the adaptation

The Llama-3.1-8B-Adapted models are trained on a collection of Italian and English data extracted from CulturaX. The data are extracted to be skewed toward Italian language with a ration of one over four. Extracting the first 9B tokens from Italian part of CulturaX and the first 3B tokens from English part of CulturaX.

Data used for the instruction tuning (SFT)

The data used in the instruction following training procedure:

The model is trained for two epoches in the aforementioned data.

Evaluation

Adapted models are evaluated on ITA-Bench.

Use with Transformers

You can run conversational inference using the Transformers pipeline abstraction or by leveraging the Auto classes with the generate() function.

Make sure to update your transformers installation via pip install --upgrade transformers.

import transformers
import torch

model_id = "SemanticAlignment/Llama-3.1-8B-Italian-SAVA-instruct"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)

generator = pipeline(
    "text-generation",
    model=model_name,
    device_map="auto",
    dtype=torch.bfloat16
)

conversations.append([
    {"role": "system", "content": "Sei un assistente utile, rispondi in modo conciso e coerente."},
    {"role": "user", "content": "Cosa si può fare in una bella giornata di sole?"},
])

chat_samples = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(conversations, tokenize=False)

# get number of prompt tokens
prompt_tokens_number = len(tokenizer(chat_samples)["input_ids"])

outputs = generator(
    conversations,
    max_new_tokens=2048,
    eos_token_id=[
        tokenizer.eos_token_id,
        tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<|eot_id|>"),
    ],
)

Code: https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/sava

Aknowledgement

Thanks to Leonardo Colosi (colosi@diag.uniroma1.it) for helping in instruction tuning phase.

We acknowledge ISCRA for awarding this project access to the LEONARDO supercomputer, owned by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, hosted by CINECA (Italy).

Citation

If you use any part of this work, please consider citing the paper as follows:

@misc{moroni2025optimizingllmsitalianreducing,
      title={Optimizing LLMs for Italian: Reducing Token Fertility and Enhancing Efficiency Through Vocabulary Adaptation}, 
      author={Luca Moroni and Giovanni Puccetti and Pere-Lluis Huguet Cabot and Andrei Stefan Bejgu and Edoardo Barba and Alessio Miaschi and Felice Dell'Orletta and Andrea Esuli and Roberto Navigli},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2504.17025},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17025}, 
}