TFD: A Comprehensive Structured Tibetan Foundation Dataset for Low-Resource Language Processing and Large-Scale Modeling

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in high-resource languages, yet progress in Tibetan remains severely constrained. While recent efforts have begun to address pre-training data scarcity for Tibetan, a more fundamental gap persists: no existing resource supports the complete LLM development pipeline, spanning pre-training, instruction tuning, safety alignment, preference optimization, and reasoning supervision. We introduce the Tibetan Foundation Dataset (TFD), the first structured, large-scale, and expert-curated dataset covering all key stages of Tibetan large language modeling. TFD comprises TIBSTC, a unified corpus of over 11 billion tokens with curated sub-datasets for instruction tuning, safety alignment, and preference optimization, and TIBSTC-CoT, the first large-scale Tibetan chain-of-thought dataset. We demonstrate its utility by training the Sun-Shine family of Tibetan LLMs, achieving substantial improvements over strong baselines on understanding, safety, reasoning, and generation benchmarks. These results underscore that advancing low-resource language modeling requires not only scale, but a structurally complete data ecosystem. We release TFD to facilitate reproducible research and the development of robust, culturally aligned Tibetan LLMs. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Vicentvankor/sun-shine.