LLiMba: Sardinian on a Single GPU -- Adapting a 3B Language Model to a Vanishing Romance Language
Sardinian, a Romance language with roughly one million speakers, has minimal presence in modern NLP. Commercial services do not support it, and current language models do not produce it reliably. We present LLiMba, a 3B parameter Sardinian-ready model adapted from Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct through continued pretraining (CPT) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a single 24 GB consumer GPU. The corpus contains 11.5 million tokens of Sardinian spanning LSC, Logudorese, and Campidanese, augmented with 2.4 million tokens of related Romance text as replay against register blurring. After CPT the model reaches a perplexity of 6.76 on held out Sardinian and outperforms the base across all six FLORES-20...
| Authors | Luca Ballore |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 9 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 May 2026 |
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