arXiv AI

Zero-Compute Cross-Lingual Transferability Estimation Using Typological Feature Proxies

arXiv AI
1d ago

Linguistic Loopholes in LLM Unlearning: From a 174-Language Benchmark to Coverage-Aware Unlearning

The paper introduces the problem of cross‑lingual loopholes in large language model (LLM) unlearning, where forgetting a fact in one language can leave it accessible in others. It presents a new 174‑language benchmark, the Cross‑Lingual Unlearning Tensor, and proposes COVER, a method that selects a subset of source languages to maximize unlearning coverage under a language budget. Experiments show COVER reduces residual knowledge by 7.8–27.3% compared to uniform selection and works on both synthetic and real low‑resource news data.

By Tyler Skow, Shravan Chaudhari, Rama Chellappa, Abhay Yadav
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Beyond Cross-Lingual Transfer: Benchmarking Propagation Boundaries in Multilingual LLM Unlearning

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.

By Pengyang Shao, Chuanpeng Lu, Wei Qin, Yanzheng Jin, Xiaohao Liu, Xi Ai, Kenji Kawaguchi, Richang Hong
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2607. 04814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale.

By Andrei Florian, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Hope Kerubo Ombaba, Xiaoyu Cui, Boniface Mwau, Biatus Maina Kamau, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Christiane Fellbaum, Happy Buzaaba
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Probing Factual Knowledge Transfer with Training Data Interventions

The paper investigates whether multilingual language models transfer factual knowledge from one language to another during continued pretraining. Using an English-pretrained model continued on Persian data with systematically removed facts, the authors create SIFT, a dataset of 500 triples across 20 relations, split by cultural origin. Their findings indicate that factual transfer is minimal, especially for Persian-related facts, and that simple removal strategies or easy negative candidate sets can overestimate transfer.

By Romina Oji, Marc Braun, Marcel Bollmann, Marco Kuhlmann, Jenny Kunz