Multi-SFT: Permissively-Licensed Multilingual Instruction-Following

Daniela Baiamonte, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Elena Fano, Stefano Simonazzi, Andrea Zugarini

Supervised fine-tuning datasets remain overwhelmingly English-centric and commercially restricted, as their content is frequently generated by proprietary models whose terms of service forbid training competing systems. We introduce Multi-SFT, a commercially permissive collection of 502,818 instruction-response pairs across five European languages, built via translation and regeneration pipelines for tasks where translation is insufficient. Human evaluation yields inter-annotator agreement of at least 0.87 across all datasets and languages. Fine-tuning nine models from three different families (EuroLLM, OLMo 2, Qwen3; 1B-32B) and evaluating them on 13 benchmarks shows that Multi-SFT alone is competitive with larger augmented mixes and official instruction-tuned releases, with decisive advantages on safety tasks.