The paper investigates attention heads in multilingual Transformer models, distinguishing between retrieval heads that pull information from context and a newly identified class called Retrieval‑Transition heads (RTH) that direct the model toward a specific target language. Experiments across four multilingual benchmarks and two model families show that masking RTHs causes a larger performance drop than masking retrieval heads, indicating RTHs are crucial for chain‑of‑thought reasoning in multilingual LLMs. The study thus clarifies which attention heads are responsible for mapping to target languages, advancing our understanding of multilingual language models.
arXiv:2602.22453v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval heads, a subset of attention heads in Transformers, were studied in English, showing its crucial role in retrieving information from the...
arXiv:2608. 00533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models have achieved substantial progress in reasoning capabilities.
arXiv:2608. 15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language-specific competency (LSC) is the phenomenon of a language model performing better or worse depending on the language of the prompt.
arXiv:2606. 01252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-target cross-lingual text summarization (MTXLS), which summarizes a source document into multiple target languages, is increasingly important as users consume content in diverse languages, but remains underexplored.
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.
arXiv:2510. 05678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) have achieved notable progress in multilingual settings, their performance remains uneven across languages as LLMs often rely on English-centric latent representations.
arXiv:2608. 10444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress on reasoning tasks that require increasingly long and complex inferential chains.
arXiv:2604.04720v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) still exhibit large performance gaps between English and other languages, yet much current work assumes these gaps ca...
The paper introduces CLLPU, a multilingual benchmark for evaluating how well large language models can unlearn specific knowledge while controlling its propagation across languages. CLLPU defines two forgetting scenarios—common-goal forgetting, which requires suppression across all languages, and language-conditioned forgetting, which limits suppression to a single language. Using 800 knowledge-unit pairs and 72,000 QA instances in ten languages, the authors test six methods on Llama‑3.1‑8B‑Instruct and find that universal suppression often fails, while language‑specific suppression can unintentionally spread to other languages, highlighting the difficulty of propagation control in multilingual unlearning.
arXiv:2607. 06327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty estimation (UE) enables LLM-powered systems to recognize when to abstain, yet existing research has predominantly focused on English.
arXiv:2608.30462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models exhibit substantial performance variation across languages, even when solving semantically equivalent tasks. Existing analyses...
The paper introduces LLM-QL, a dense retrieval model that harnesses large language models (LLMs) by maximizing query likelihood (QL) as an auxiliary task. It incorporates an Attention Block to limit predictive token attention to document tokens before the ending token and a Document Corruption component that masks parts of the document during prediction. Experiments on MS MARCO and BEIR datasets show that LLM-QL outperforms other LLM-based retrievers, and detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components.