Transfer of Structural Knowledge from Synthetic Languages

Mikhail Budnikov, Ivan Yamshchikov


Abstract
This work explores transfer learning from several synthetic languages to English. We investigate the structure of the embeddings in the fine-tuned models, the information they contain, and the capabilities of the fine-tuned models on simple linguistic tasks. We also introduce a new synthetic language that leads to better transfer to English than the languages used in previous research. Finally, we introduce Tiny-Cloze Benchmark — a new synthetic benchmark for natural language understanding that is more informative for less powerful models. We use Tiny-Cloze Benchmark to evaluate fine-tuned models in several domains demonstrating that fine-tuning on a new synthetic language allows for better performance on a variety of tasks.
Anthology ID:
2025.xllm-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Large Language Models and Structure Modeling (XLLM 2025)
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Hao Fei, Kewei Tu, Yuhui Zhang, Xiang Hu, Wenjuan Han, Zixia Jia, Zilong Zheng, Yixin Cao, Meishan Zhang, Wei Lu, N. Siddharth, Lilja Øvrelid, Nianwen Xue, Yue Zhang
Venues:
XLLM | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
242–251
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.xllm-1.20/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Mikhail Budnikov and Ivan Yamshchikov. 2025. Transfer of Structural Knowledge from Synthetic Languages. In Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Large Language Models and Structure Modeling (XLLM 2025), pages 242–251, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Transfer of Structural Knowledge from Synthetic Languages (Budnikov & Yamshchikov, XLLM 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.xllm-1.20.pdf