Optimizing LLMs for Italian: Reducing Token Fertility and Enhancing Efficiency Through Vocabulary Adaptation

The number of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasing steadily, though the majority are designed predominantly for the English language. While state-of-the-art LLMs can handle other languages, due to language contamination or some degree of multilingual pretraining data, they are not optimized for non-English languages, leading to inefficient encoding (high token "fertility") and slower inference speed. In this work, we thoroughly compare a variety of vocabulary adaptation techniques for optimizing English LLMs for the Italian language, and put forward Semantic Alignment Vocabulary Adaptation (SAVA), a novel method that leverages neural mapping for vocabulary substitution. SAVA achieves competitive performance across multiple downstream tasks, enhancing grounded alignment strategies. We adapt two LLMs: Mistral-7b-v0.1, reducing token fertility by 25\%, and Llama-3.1-8B, optimizing the vocabulary and reducing the number of parameters by 1 billion. We show that, following the adaptation of the vocabulary, these models can recover their performance with a relatively limited stage of continual training on the target language. Finally, we test the capabilities of the adapted models on various multi-choice and generative tasks.

Right Answer, Wrong Score: Uncovering the Inconsistencies of LLM Evaluation in Multiple-Choice Question Answering

One of the most widely used tasks to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) is Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA). While open-ended question answering tasks are more challenging to evaluate, MCQA tasks are, in principle, easier to assess, as the model's answer is thought to be simple to extract and is directly compared to a set of predefined choices. However, recent studies have started to question the reliability of MCQA evaluation, showing that multiple factors can significantly impact the reported performance of LLMs, especially when the model generates free-form text before selecting one of the answer choices. In this work, we shed light on the inconsistencies of MCQA evaluation strategies, which can lead to inaccurate and misleading model comparisons. We systematically analyze whether existing answer extraction methods are aligned with human judgment, and how they are influenced by answer constraints in the prompt across different domains. Our experiments demonstrate that traditional evaluation strategies often underestimate LLM capabilities, while LLM-based answer extractors are prone to systematic errors. Moreover, we reveal a fundamental trade-off between including format constraints in the prompt to simplify answer extraction and allowing models to generate free-form text to improve reasoning. Our findings call for standardized evaluation methodologies and highlight the need for more reliable and consistent MCQA evaluation practices.

On the effectiveness of smartphone IMU sensors and Deep Learning in the detection of cardiorespiratory conditions

This research introduces an innovative method for the early screening of cardiorespiratory diseases based on an acquisition protocol, which leverages commodity smartphone's Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and deep learning techniques. We collected, in a clinical setting, a dataset featuring recordings of breathing kinematics obtained by accelerometer and gyroscope readings from five distinct body regions. We propose an end-to-end deep learning pipeline for early cardiorespiratory disease screening, incorporating a preprocessing step segmenting the data into individual breathing cycles, and a recurrent bidirectional module capturing features from diverse body regions. We employed Leave-one-out-cross-validation with Bayesian optimization for hyperparameter tuning and model selection. The experimental results consistently demonstrated the superior performance of a bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) as a feature encoder architecture, yielding an average sensitivity of $0.81 \pm 0.02$, specificity of $0.82 \pm 0.05$, F1 score of $0.81 \pm 0.02$, and accuracy of $80.2\% \pm 3.9$ across diverse seed variations. We also assessed generalization capabilities on a skewed distribution, comprising exclusively healthy patients not used in training, revealing a true negative rate of $74.8 \% \pm 4.5$. The sustained accuracy of predictions over time during breathing cycles within a single patient underscores the efficacy of the preprocessing strategy, highlighting the model's ability to discern significant patterns throughout distinct phases of the respiratory cycle. This investigation underscores the potential usefulness of widely available smartphones as devices for timely cardiorespiratory disease screening in the general population, in at-home settings, offering crucial assistance to public health efforts (especially during a pandemic outbreaks, such as the recent COVID-19).