arXiv:2608.30092v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We present Arkios, a 1.04B-parameter dense transformer pretrained from scratch on 150B tokens of bilingual English-Nepali text, using a custom single...
By Sajal Regmi, Siddhartha Pudasaini, Chetan Phakami Pun
The study investigates the performance gap between native-language reasoning and English-pivoted reasoning in large language models. By creating extensive multilingual reasoning datasets and fine‑tuning specialists on Qwen/Qwen3-8B-Base, the authors find that the native reasoning gap is much smaller (1.9–3.5%) than previously reported. They analyze weight‑space changes, discover a language‑agnostic reasoning core in the middle layers, and propose a Layer Swap technique that transfers these mid‑layer updates from an English specialist to native specialists, effectively closing most of the gap while maintaining native chain‑of‑thought output.
By Maxence Lasbordes, Am\'elie Chatelain, Djam\'e Seddah
arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.
By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
arXiv:2507.23248v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Bengali is spoken by more than 230 million people, yet no standardized instrument evaluates large language models (LLMs) on Bengali across th...
By Shimanto Bhowmik, Tawsif Tashwar Dipto, Md Sazzad Islam, Sheryl Hsu, Tahsin Reasat
The paper presents a unified evaluation of cross‑lingual consistency (CLC) enhancement methods for multilingual language models, covering inference‑time interventions and post‑training approaches across three model families and three closed‑form benchmarks. Results indicate that post‑training methods, especially direct distribution alignment, consistently improve CLC across all model‑dataset combinations, while other methods are more sensitive to answer format and language coverage. The study also examines the impact of CLC enhancement on culturally diverse question answering, finding no systematic degradation in controlled settings but occasional accuracy drops in open‑ended generation, particularly for non‑English responses.
By Jirui Qi, Mingyang Wang, Hinrich Sch\"utze, Raquel Fern\'andez, Arianna Bisazza
arXiv:2609.37104v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Open-source reasoning models provide unequal access to reasoning capability across languages. When a model can solve a problem but cannot deliver a c...
By Hongyang Li, Xiao Li, Caesar Wu, Gr\'egoire Danoy, Pascal Bouvry
arXiv:2609.22138v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Hidden-state hallucination probing - training a linear classifier on an LLM's internal activations to detect whether a generated answer is faithful t...
By Tanveer Singh (Plaksha University)
The study evaluates how different input representations—orthographic text, IPA transcription, and romanization—affect cross‑lingual transfer in autoregressive multilingual language models. Across three model sizes and eight languages grouped into typologically motivated pairs, romanized pretraining consistently outperforms native orthography and IPA, especially as model scale increases. Fine‑tuning a text‑pretrained model on romanized data can harm performance on languages already covered by the base model, suggesting romanization should be integrated at pretraining rather than applied later.
By Muge Zhang, Aaron Jencks, Krishna Badikela, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sachin Kumar
The paper investigates weight‑space merging of independently fine‑tuned multilingual machine translation models. Experiments show that merging is more successful when models share a target language, yet it still cannot match the peak performance of language‑specific checkpoints. When target languages differ, performance drops sharply, and analysis reveals that overlapping neuron activation and incompatible upper‑layer geometries cause these failures.
By Baban Gain, Trilok Nath Singh, Asif Ekbal
Large language models (LLMs) process text through subword tokenizers rather than directly reading characters or words. Because these tokenizers are trained predominantly on English-centric corpora, they introduce a systematic and often overlooked disadvantage for many non-English languages.
arXiv:2608. 08447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual reasoning models are commonly evaluated by whether they arrive at the correct answer, but not by whether they preserve the intended language while reasoning and responding.
By Muhammad Ali Shafique, Kelly Marchisio
arXiv:2607. 24276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) process text through subword tokenizers rather than directly reading characters or words.
By Priyansh Srivastava