🌍 Multilingual SLM — Ateso · Luganda · English · Runyankore · Japadhola

A lightweight, multilingual Small Language Model (SLM) fine-tuned for question-and-answer tasks across five languages spoken in Uganda and East Africa. Built on top of CohereLabs/tiny-aya-global using LoRA (PEFT), this model is optimized for low-resource, local-language understanding.

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Model Details

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Supported Languages

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Intended Use

✅ Direct Use

This model is designed for question-and-answer inference in multilingual East African contexts. It is suitable for:

• Building local-language chatbots and virtual assistants
• Educational tools for Ugandan language communities
• Research into low-resource NLP for African languages
• Prototyping QA systems before scaling to larger datasets

🔧 Downstream Use

The model can be further fine-tuned or integrated into:

• Mobile or web-based community knowledge bases
• Agricultural, health, or civic information systems in local languages
• Language learning applications

❌ Out-of-Scope Use

• High-stakes or safety-critical applications without additional evaluation
• Languages not covered in training (the model may produce low-quality outputs)
• Tasks beyond question-answering (e.g., code generation, summarization) without further fine-tuning

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How to Get Started

Installation

pip install transformers peft torch

Inference

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM
from peft import PeftModel

base_model_id = "CohereLabs/tiny-aya-global"
adapter_id = "Bateesa/tiny-aya-global-lora-qa" 

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(base_model_id)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(base_model_id)
model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(model, adapter_id)
model.eval()

def ask(question: str) -> str:
    prompt = f"Question: {question}\nAnswer:"
    inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
    outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=128)
    return tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True)

# English
print(ask("What is the capital of Uganda?"))

# Luganda
print(ask("Ekibuga ekikulembera Uganda kye ki?"))

# Runyankore
print(ask("Obwakabaka bw'Uganda nibuki?"))

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Training Details

Training Data

• Dataset size: 90K custom QA pairs
• Format: Instruction-style prompt/response pairs (Question: ... \nAnswer: ...)
• Languages: Balanced across Ateso, Luganda, English, Runyankore, and Japadhola
• Source: Manually curated domain-specific questions and answers relevant to East African contexts

Training Procedure

Fine-tuned using LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) via the HuggingFace PEFT library on top of CohereLabs/tiny-aya-global.

Training Hyperparameters

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Evaluation

Testing Data

Held-out subset from the 90K custom QA samples, with manual review of responses across all five languages.

Metrics

• Qualitative review: Human evaluation of answer relevance and fluency per language
• BLEU / ROUGE: Planned for future evaluation with expanded dataset

Results

⚠️ This model is trained on a small dataset of 90 samples. Performance may vary across languages and domains. It is best used as a baseline or proof-of-concept. Expanding the training dataset is strongly recommended for production use.

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Bias, Risks, and Limitations

• Small dataset (90K samples): The model may hallucinate or give incorrect answers, particularly for rare or complex questions.
• Language imbalance: If training samples were not evenly distributed, some languages may perform better than others.
• Cultural context: The model may not capture nuanced cultural meanings or idiomatic expressions in all five languages.
• No safety fine-tuning: This model has not been RLHF-tuned or filtered for harmful outputs.

Recommendations

Users should validate model outputs before deploying in community-facing applications. Additional data collection and evaluation is recommended, especially for Ateso and Japadhola which have fewer NLP resources available.

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Environmental Impact

Carbon emissions can be estimated using the Machine Learning Impact Calculator.

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Citation

If you use this model in your research or application, please cite:

@misc{multilingual-slm-ug,
  title     = {Multilingual SLM for Ugandan Languages: Ateso, Luganda, English, Runyankore, Japadhola},
  author    = {PhosAI},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {HuggingFace},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/Bateesa/tiny-aya-global-lora-qa}
}

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Model Card Contact

For questions, feedback, or collaboration inquiries, please open an issue on the model repository or contact [your contact info].

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Framework Versions

• PEFT 0.18.1
• Transformers ≥ 4.38.0
• PyTorch ≥ 2.0