[2605.26293] CroCo: Cross-Lingual Contrastive Preference Tuning on Self-Generations
[Submitted on 25 May 2026]
Title:CroCo: Cross-Lingual Contrastive Preference Tuning on Self-Generations
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Abstract:Prior work establishes that controlled contrastiveness between self-generated responses from large language models, set via reward scores, improves downstream preference tuning in English. We extend this method to multiple languages and evaluate two models across a total of 14 high and low-resource languages on a diverse set of tasks. Our central finding is that cross-lingual contrastive preference tuning on self-generations (CroCo) transfers without language-specific preference annotation. A reward model trained on English preferences (atop a multilingual base) produces useful within-language rankings across most languages, and pairing in either a monolingual or multilingual setting improves over each model on the majority of setups while preventing the catastrophic forgetting of supervised fine-tuning. We observe that the gains require on-policy data. Off-policy responses reduce the benefit and online preference optimization fails to improve over the offline variant. Specifically, on structured tasks, our method matches or exceeds the base in 6/7 languages for EuroLLM-9B and 4/7 settings for Aya-3B. On open-ended generation, both tuned models win against their respective base across 11 evaluated languages. Overall, we show promising directions for multilingual preference tuning.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.26293 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2605.26293v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.26293
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Mike Zhang [view email] [v1] Mon, 25 May 2026 19:30:45 UTC (1,367 KB)
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