Optimizing LLMs for Italian: Reducing Token Fertility and Enhancing
  Efficiency Through Vocabulary Adaptation
Authors: name: Luca Moroni; name: Giovanni Puccetti; name: Pere-Lluis Huguet Cabot; name: Andrei Stefan Bejgu; name: Edoardo Barba; name: Alessio Miaschi; name: Felice Dell'Orletta; name: Andrea Esuli; name: Roberto Navigli
Published: 2025-04-23 18:12:27

Abstract: 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.