Language verY Rare for All

In the quest to overcome language barriers, encoder-decoder models like NLLB have expanded machine translation to rare languages, with some models (e.g., NLLB 1.3B) even trainable on a single GPU. While general-purpose LLMs perform well in translation, open LLMs prove highly competitive when fine-tuned for specific tasks involving unknown corpora. We introduce LYRA (Language verY Rare for All), a novel approach that combines open LLM fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and transfer learning from related high-resource languages. This study is exclusively focused on single-GPU training to facilitate ease of adoption. Our study focuses on two-way translation between French and Mon\'egasque, a rare language unsupported by existing translation tools due to limited corpus availability. Our results demonstrate LYRA's effectiveness, frequently surpassing and consistently matching state-of-the-art encoder-decoder models in rare language translation.

X-SHAP: towards multiplicative explainability of Machine Learning

This paper introduces X-SHAP, a model-agnostic method that assesses multiplicative contributions of variables for both local and global predictions. This method theoretically and operationally extends the so-called additive SHAP approach. It proves useful underlying multiplicative interactions of factors, typically arising in sectors where Generalized Linear Models are traditionally used, such as in insurance or biology. We test the method on various datasets and propose a set of techniques based on individual X-SHAP contributions to build aggregated multiplicative contributions and to capture multiplicative feature importance, that we compare to traditional techniques.