  The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly transformed
the field of natural language processing, although the focus on English-centric
models has created a noticeable research gap for specific languages, including
Vietnamese. To address this issue, this paper presents vi-mistral-x, an
innovative Large Language Model designed expressly for the Vietnamese language.
It utilizes a unique method of continual pre-training, based on the Mistral
architecture, which incorporates grouped-query attention and sliding window
attention techniques. This model, vi-Mistral-X, marks a significant step
forward in improving the understanding and generation of the Vietnamese
language. It introduces an additional phase of continual pre-training,
specifically adapted for Vietnamese, enhancing the model's capability in
understanding complex language nuances and generating accurate, context-aware
Vietnamese text. Through comprehensive testing on various benchmarks,
vi-mistral-x has shown to outperform existing Vietnamese LLMs in several key
areas, including text classification, question answering, and text generation.
Particularly, in the Vietnamese Multitask Language Understanding (VMLU)
benchmark, vi-mistral-x sets a new standard, outperforming other available
models significantly. This paper highlights the critical role of continual
pre-training in advancing language-specific LLMs and opens new avenues for the
development of multilingual models. We aim for vi-mistral-x to not just be an
important asset for processing the Vietnamese language but also to encourage
more advancements in creating large language models for languages that are less
represented.
