The paper introduces latent‑space language steering, a lightweight inference‑time technique that uses Principal Component Analysis on parallel translations to identify language directions in token embeddings. By steering embeddings along these axes, the method reduces unintended code‑switching in multilingual large language models, achieving up to 55% lower next‑token distributional divergence and a 63–99% drop in the Code‑Switching Index while maintaining semantic integrity and incurring negligible computational cost. The authors also demonstrate that a single principal component can classify language with 95–99% accuracy and provide an analysis of how language representations evolve across model layers.
By Andrey Goncharov, Nikolai Kondusov, Alexey Zaytsev
The paper investigates whether training small decoder-only transformers on code‑switched text can induce cross‑lingual alignment. Using two 100‑million‑word multilingual corpora—one a mix of English, Dutch, and Chinese BabyBabelLM data, and another generated by inserting word‑ and sentence‑level code‑switching via an LLM—the authors find that code‑switched training aligns representations of parallel text, especially across different scripts, and that this alignment persists when later training on monolingual documents. A curriculum that progresses from word‑level code‑switching to sentence‑level code‑switching and finally to monolingual data yields models that outperform baselines on the BabyLM evaluation suite, demonstrating that code‑switching curriculum learning is an effective data augmentation strategy for multilingual pretraining.
By Dries Rooryck, Alex Cai, Yonatan Belinkov, David Alvarez-Melis, Kiant\'e Brantley
arXiv:2410. 07809v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multilingual instruction tuning (MIT) is challenged by the curse of multilinguality, data scarcity, and high computational cost.
By G\"urkan Soykan, G\"ozde G\"ul \c{S}ahin
arXiv:2604. 03532v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show strong multilingual capabilities, yet reliably controlling the language of their outputs remains difficult.
By Sing Hieng Wong, Hassan Sajjad, A. B. Siddique
Large language models show strong cross‑lingual abilities, but previous studies have examined them only at isolated training points. This work pretrains a 1.7B multilingual model on nine languages, recording checkpoints at fine granularity to track translation development. Using word‑level translation and a new dataset, the authors find that early learning is dominated by token‑level copying and surface similarities, while later stages involve more general translation mechanisms and refined copying.
By Felicia K\"orner, Maria Matveev, Florian Eichin, Gitta Kutyniok, Barbara Plank, Michael A. Hedderich
The paper investigates whether sparse autoencoder (SAE) features that recur across different language settings in Gemma 2 and Gemma 3 actually have consistent causal effects on translation performance. By reproducing Wu et al.’s discovery method and extending it to multilingual prompts, the authors find over 20 frequently activating features, yet causal validation reveals that almost all have negligible or inconsistent impacts. Only one feature—Gemma 2’s (L10, 5717) and Gemma 3’s (L20, 2456)—consistently improves COMET scores when amplified and worsens them when ablated across 23 language settings, indicating a language‑agnostic translation‑initiation direction.
By Giang Son Nguyen, Nhi Ngoc-Yen Nguyen, Wray Buntine, Dung D. Le
arXiv:2609.23490v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly execute multi-step workflows through tool use and interaction with users and environments. However, curr...
By Peng Kuang, Yuchun Fan, Jiangnan Li, Minghao Wu, Jialong Tang, Hao-Ran Wei, Weixuan Wang, Jianhong Tu, Baosong Yang, Tong Xiao
arXiv:2601.16390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, yet significant performance gaps persist between dominant and non-dominant la...
By Rhitabrat Pokharel, Ameeta Agrawal, Tanay Nagar
arXiv:2601. 05366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that invoke external tools through structured function calls.
By Zheng Luo, T Pranav Kutralingam, Ogochukwu N Okoani, Wanpeng Xu, Hua Wei, Xiyang Hu
The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.
By Xiulin Yang, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Catherine Arnett
arXiv:2605.29637v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models often exhibit a substantial gap between their performance in English and in lower-resourced languages on equivalent knowledge...
By Debajyoti Mazumder, Divyansh Pathak, Prashant Kodali, Aditya Joshi, Akshay Agarwal, Jasabanta Patro
arXiv:2608.28641v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Most evaluations for coding agents are conducted exclusively in English, which does not reflect real-world multilingual deployment. We present Termin...
By Yunsu Kim, Kaden Uhlig, Ashwin Purohit, Milind Agarwal, Patrick Simianer, Anil Arslan, Kiarash Mokhtari, Thomas Zenkel, Johannes Mosig, Gabriel Bretschner, Shamik Bose, Joern Wuebker, John DeNero