Pearl-Chat: Engineering a native Luganda language model from first principles in JAX and Flax NNX
Autoregressive foundation language models predominantly target high-resource Indo-European languages, imposing computational and morphological penalties on under-represented African languages. Generic multilingual tokenizers routinely exceed fertility rates of 3.2 tokens per word on agglutinative Bantu languages, degrading context efficiency and inflating latency. We present Pearl-Chat, an 8,473,122-parameter ($\sim$8.5M) causal decoder-only transformer engineered for Luganda (Oluganda, ISO 639-2: lg), a low-resource Niger-Congo Bantu language spoken by over 10 million people in East Africa. Built from first mathematical principles in JAX and Flax NNX, Pearl-Chat uses explicit functional ...
| Authors | Wesley Kambale, Roland Sankara |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
Popularity, last 6 days
0 now. Counts as reported by the source, snapshotted daily by Silytics.
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 24 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.