[Submitted on 14 Oct 2026]
Authors:Gwénolé Lecorvé, Delphine Charlet, Pierre Adam, Floriane Behanzin, Lionel Delphin-Poulat, Johannes Heinecke, Géraldine Damnati, Pelin Kaytmaz, Nourredine Khaous, Charbel Kindji, Meriam Maadi, Abdoulaye Mbaye, Claire Perroux, Ismaël Rousseau, Papa Séga Wadé, Gilles Xiberras, Olivier Zhang, Malek Zitouni
Abstract:Wolof is spoken by 23M people, mostly in Senegal, but remains weakly supported by open-weight language models, while API models raise cost, governance, and sovereignty constraints for local deployments. In this paper, we present 0.6B-14B open-weight models adapted to Wolof through instruction tuning, preference alignment, and model merging. After presenting the pipeline and data, extensive experiments on 63~public and in-house tasks show good performance on Wolof understanding and generation while remaining effective on other languages and cross-lingual skills, with the 8B and 14B models being particularly competitive with substantially larger commercial systems. The models are currently being evaluated in internal customer-care pilots and are publicly available at this https URL .
Submission history
From: Gwénolé Lecorvé [view email]
[v1] Wed, 14 Oct 2026 19:10:23 UTC (215 KB)
