arXiv:2606. 14347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, however, their internal representations are difficult to interpret.
arXiv:2608.28924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linguistic theory has long recognized cross-linguistic syntactic regularities, leading to claims that these similar structures are processed by similar...
arXiv:2609.01356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multilingual large language models (mLLMs) achieve strong performance in machine translation, yet our understanding of the mechanisms by which they tra...
The paper evaluates four metrics—CKA, ANC, GMM dominance per token, and ILO—used to measure cross‑lingual representation sharing in multilingual language models. Across 21 models ranging from 125 M to 14 B parameters, the metrics disagree, and the authors attribute this to anisotropy, where representations cluster in a narrow embedding cone. Only ILO shows a strong, robust correlation with cross‑lingual transfer performance (Spearman’s ρ = 0.90) after controlling for model size, family, and task variation, leading the authors to recommend ILO as the primary metric alongside anisotropy diagnostics.
The paper investigates whether different latent language probes—GMM-based representation probes and decoding-based probes—measure the same phenomenon in multilingual language models. Across various model families, training regimes, domains, tasks, checkpoints, and up to 27 languages, the authors find systematic disagreement: representation probes indicate earlier cross‑lingual mixing, while decoding probes reveal sharper, English‑biased language signals. These differences correlate with model multilinguality and training progression but remain relatively stable across domains, suggesting that current probes capture distinct aspects of multilingual processing rather than a single internal lingua franca.
The study compares an English-only and a bilingual decoder-only model, each 310 M parameters, trained on eight diverse languages while controlling for English exposure, compute, and document overlap. After aligning on shared English vocabulary, the authors find that token embeddings appear similar, but the deeper hidden states used for prediction diverge across models. This hidden‑state mismatch grows through middle transformer layers and persists despite controls, indicating that contextual processing differs between the models. "whyItMatters":"The findings show that embedding alignment can conceal significant internal representation differences, which is crucial for any downstream work that assumes aligned multilingual models are interchangeable."
arXiv:2610.07168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Representations of translated sentences are similar in the inner layers of multilingual language models -- an observation connected to the platonic rep...
arXiv:2606. 01800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have excelled in processing multiple languages through pre- and post-training on multilingual data, even though English dominates the training data.
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.
The paper investigates why large language models sometimes hallucinate when asked about facts in a language different from the one in which the facts were learned. By training small Transformer models on synthetic multilingual datasets, the authors show that the degree of correlation between facts and their learning language (informativeness) and the ease of language identification (extractability) determine whether models develop unified or separate representations across languages. Unified representations enable cross‑lingual fact transfer, while separate representations do not. The study proposes a unifying perspective on cross‑lingual transfer and suggests training methods to promote representational unification.
arXiv:2610.06897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Localizing latent structures in the activation space of language models (LMs) is central to understanding and controlling their behavior. Yet, localize...
arXiv:2605.05593v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across diverse tasks, the internal mechanisms governing how they encode...
arXiv:2610.08303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current evaluation of multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) rests on an implicit Translation-Isomorphism Assumption (TIA): that semantic structures...