The paper proposes using multilingual sentiment lexicons to steer language models for sentiment control, especially in low-resource languages. It finds that aggregated multilingual lexicons outperform English-derived steering vectors for mid- and low-resource languages, while monolingual lexicons are still best for languages the model was pre-trained on. The study also explains how representational density, pre-training priors, and architectural biases affect steering effectiveness, noting that large English vectors can cause linguistic collapse in low-resource settings but this is mitigated by norm-dampening in multilingual aggregation.
arXiv:2601.16390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, yet significant performance gaps persist between dominant and non-dominant la...
arXiv:2606.18389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become an effective tool for synthetic data generation, including for low-resource languages, where generated dat...
CroCo introduces cross‑lingual contrastive preference tuning on self‑generations, extending prior English‑only methods to 14 high‑ and low‑resource languages. A reward model trained solely on English preferences, applied to a multilingual base, yields effective within‑language rankings and improves performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings without catastrophic forgetting. The approach requires on‑policy data; off‑policy responses and online preference optimization offer limited gains, yet on structured tasks CroCo matches or surpasses the base model in most languages, and on open‑ended generation it wins 28/30 judge evaluations across 15 languages.
The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.
arXiv:2410. 07809v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multilingual instruction tuning (MIT) is challenged by the curse of multilinguality, data scarcity, and high computational cost.
arXiv:2512. 20757v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tokenizers provide the fundamental basis through which text is represented and processed by language models (LMs).
The paper audits 51 multilingual evaluation benchmarks covering 242 datasets and 219 languages, focusing on coverage, representativeness, and rigor. It finds that while coverage is broad, many languages appear in only one benchmark and entire regions are underrepresented, with low-resource languages evaluated on far fewer tasks than high-resource ones. The study also highlights that most datasets rely on English translations, creating artifacts and limiting cultural relevance, and that benchmark contamination through translation leakage and corpus overlap undermines rigor. Recommendations call for natively constructed, culturally grounded, contamination-aware evaluation frameworks that truly serve the communities they aim to assess.
The paper audits 51 recent multilingual evaluation benchmarks covering 242 datasets and 219 languages, focusing on coverage, representativeness, and rigor. It finds that while coverage is broad, many languages appear in only one benchmark and entire regions are underrepresented; low‑resource languages face a task equity gap. Representativeness is compromised by heavy reliance on English translations, and rigor is weakened by benchmark contamination and parallel‑corpus overlap. The authors propose concrete recommendations for building evaluation frameworks that are natively constructed, culturally grounded, contamination‑aware, and community‑aligned.
arXiv:2601.15809v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An increasing body of work has leveraged multilingual language models for Natural Language Generation tasks such as summarization. A major empirica...
The paper investigates how multilingual large language models can unintentionally switch languages during generation. It compares three techniques—ValSel, FreqSel, and AnnSel—for pinpointing latent variables that control language choice in cross‑layer transcoders. Using new multilingual benchmarks and targeted interventions on Gemma‑2‑2B and Qwen3‑4B, the study finds all methods can steer output language, with FreqSel performing best and AnnSel providing interpretable selections via explicit annotations.
Large language models show strong cross‑lingual abilities, but previous studies have examined them only at isolated training points. This work pretrains a 1.7B multilingual model on nine languages, recording checkpoints at fine granularity to track translation development. Using word‑level translation and a new dataset, the authors find that early learning is dominated by token‑level copying and surface similarities, while later stages involve more general translation mechanisms and refined copying.
arXiv:2608. 07629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models such as NLLB-200 cover 200 languages but leave thousands unsupported, including most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon.