arXiv AI

AlignAtt4LLM: Fast AlignAtt for Decoder-Only LLMs at IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation Task

arXiv:2606. 03967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We describe AlignAtt4LLM, an IWSLT 2026 simultaneous speech translation system for English to German, Italian, and Chinese.

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Listening to the Wise Few: Query-Key Alignment Unlocks Latent Correct Answers in Large Language Models

arXiv:2410.02343v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) routinely fail to output the correct option in multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) while encoding the answer int...

By Eduard Tulchinskii, Kristian Kuznetsov, Laida Kushnareva, Anastasia Voznyuk, Andrei Andriiainen, Irina Piontkovskaya, Evgeny Burnaev, Serguei Barannikov
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Why Better Cross-Lingual Alignment Fails for Better Cross-Lingual Transfer: Case of Encoders

The paper challenges the assumption that improving cross‑lingual alignment automatically enhances cross‑lingual transfer. Using XLM‑R models aligned on token, sentence, and masked‑language‑modeling objectives across four language pairs, the authors evaluate zero‑shot transfer on part‑of‑speech tagging and sentence classification. They find that embedding‑based alignment metrics poorly predict downstream performance and that alignment and task gradients are often nearly orthogonal, especially when operating at different representational levels.

By Yana Veitsman, Yihong Liu, Hinrich Sch\"utze
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Encoded but Not Decoded: Layer-Localized Evidence for a Three-Level Gap in LLM Syntax

The paper introduces a three-level evaluation framework—behavioral deployment, LM-head readout, and probe recoverability—to distinguish whether a language model fails a syntactic test by not encoding structure or by failing to use it. Using a trilingual control-dependency benchmark, the authors find that probe recoverability consistently exceeds LM-head readout, which in turn exceeds behavioral deployment across seven models and three languages, with the largest gap observed in Qwen3-0.6B Instruct. Layer-localized activation patching shows that instruction tuning shifts the decoded layer later, suggesting decoding favors surface shortcuts and that behavioral evaluation understates what models encode while probing alone overstates what they deploy.

By Zhenyan Lu, He Wang, Xiaohui Huang