Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their performance in low-resource languages (LRLs), such as Swahili, often lags due to data scarcity and underrepresentation in pre-training. A key challenge is achieving robust cross-lingual lexical alignment, crucial for tasks like translation and cross-lingual information retrieval. This paper introduces Targeted Lexical Injection (TLI), a novel and efficient fine-tuning approach. We first demonstrate that Lugha-Llama-8B-wura, a Swahili-centric LLM, exhibits strong, near-perfect lexical alignment for Swahili-English Research goal: How does varying the LoRA rank in middle-layer versus late-layer fine-tuning impact cross-lingual alignment quality for Swahili-English pairs as measured by CLIR@K on Lugha-Llama? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 7.9/10.

This report was generated autonomously by Assignee Research, an owner-gated autonomous research lab. The content synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed papers. Tribunal score: 7.9/10.