H. Varol

Translate, Search, or Answer: Cost-Aware Cross-Lingual Retrieval for Kazakh Small Language Models

This work systematically compares zero-shot parametric generation, in-language retrieval, and cross-lingual (translate-then-retrieve) web search using three 4B-parameter SLMs in both reasoning and non-reasoning modes and proposes a training-free, self-aware router that uses majority voting over repeated self-verification decisions to determine when to search the web, and when to escalate to a more capable cloud model.