arXiv AI

Ventriloquist LLMs: Linear Alignment of Late-Stage Representations

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Perturbation: A simple and efficient adversarial tracer for representation learning in language models

The paper introduces Perturbation, a method that treats representations in language models as learning conduits rather than activation patterns. By fine‑tuning a model on a single adversarial example and observing how this perturbation spreads to other inputs, the approach avoids geometric assumptions and does not identify representations in untrained models. In trained models, Perturbation uncovers structured transfer across multiple linguistic scales, indicating that language models generalize along representational lines and acquire linguistic abstractions through experience.

By Joshua Rozner, Cory Shain
arXiv AI
Aug 11

LF${}^{2}$AR: Accounting for Layerwise Dynamics to Improve Multimodal Adaptation of Language Models

arXiv:2503. 06211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text-pretrained language models (LMs) encode rich world knowledge, but adapting them to process and generate perceptual modalities such as audio and images while effectively leveraging that knowledge remains challenging.

By Santiago Cuervo, Adel Moumen, Yanis Labrak, Sameer Khurana, Antoine Laurent, Mickael Rouvier, Phil Woodland, Ricard Marxer
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

How Much is Left? LLMs Linearly Encode Their Remaining Output Length

arXiv:2607. 05316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models generate one token at a time, yet their responses show remarkably consistent length structure: step-by-step solutions converge in predictable token counts, retrievals stop after a few sentences, retractions extend responses by measurable amounts.

By Mohamed Amine Merzouk, Dmitri Carpov, Mirko Bronzi, Damiano Fornasiere, Adam Oberman
arXiv AI
Sep 4

One Model to Translate Them All? A Journey to Mount Doom for Multilingual Model Merging

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Cross-Lingual Alignment Without Joint Training: Do Monolingual Language Models Converge on Universal Representations?

The study investigates whether monolingual language models, trained without joint multilingual objectives, develop cross-lingual alignment. By evaluating models such as Goldfish and independently built monolingual systems, the authors find that alignable representational geometry emerges across layers, strengthening with larger data, larger models, or closer linguistic proximity. A single Procrustes rotation on parallel sentences can map hidden states between models, and applying this rotation to a German model’s residuals swaps factual predictions to those of the donor English model, demonstrating functional transfer.

By Ej Zhou, Suchir Salhan, Catherine Arnett, Anna Korhonen