arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Can Dialects Be Steered Like Languages? Sparse Neurons and Distributed Directions in Arabic LLMs

The paper investigates how Arabic dialects are represented in large language models and whether they can be steered at inference time. By analyzing neuron-level sparsity and vector steering, the authors find that only a small fraction of neurons encode dialect-specific features, while distributed activation directions are more effective for steering. Vector steering can induce dialectal output from both dialectal and MSA prompts, whereas neuron steering works only when the prompt is already dialectal.

By Kareem Elozeiri, Mervat Abassy, Omar Kallas, Fahim Dalvi, Preslav Nakov, Kentaro Inui, Nadir Durrani
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Why are all LLMs Obsessed with Japanese Culture? On the Hidden Cultural and Regional Biases of LLMs

The paper investigates cultural biases in large language models (LLMs) by introducing the Culture-Related Open Questions (CROQ) dataset, which contains 24‑language questions about generic culture. Experiments reveal that LLMs disproportionately favor Japan in their responses, especially when prompted in high‑resource languages, while low‑resource languages tend to highlight countries where the language is official. The study also finds that these biases emerge after supervised fine‑tuning rather than during pre‑training.

By Joseba Fernandez de Landa, Carla Perez-Almendros, Jose Camacho-Collados