The paper introduces LLM-QL, a dense retrieval model that harnesses large language models (LLMs) by maximizing query likelihood (QL) as an auxiliary task. It incorporates an Attention Block to limit predictive token attention to document tokens before the ending token and a Document Corruption component that masks parts of the document during prediction. Experiments on MS MARCO and BEIR datasets show that LLM-QL outperforms other LLM-based retrievers, and detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components.
By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Xiaojie Sun, Shihao Liu, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng
The paper proposes the interlingua hypothesis, suggesting that large language models translate by encoding a source sentence into a latent, task‑agnostic feature space and then decoding a target sentence from that space. Three lines of evidence support this: (1) BLEU variance across language pairs is largely explained by language‑specific competences without pair‑specific interactions; (2) many model components influence both monolingual and translation tasks; and (3) fine‑tuning on monolingual data recovers most translation gains seen with aligned documents. These findings converge to support the hypothesis and point toward new ways to understand and improve LLM translation.
By Jacob Brinton, Jannik Brinkmann, Mark Crovella, Aaron Mueller
LuxIT is a monolingual instruction‑tuning dataset for Luxembourgish, created by synthesizing instruction‑answer pairs from native texts using the DeepSeek‑R1‑0528 model and a quality‑assurance LLM‑as‑judge process. The resulting 227,507 high‑quality pairs were used to fine‑tune 14 LLMs (≤15 B parameters), yielding an average accuracy increase of +5.37 percentage points on standardized Luxembourgish proficiency exams and improvements in macro‑averaged F1 on nine of the fourteen downstream NLP tasks. These findings demonstrate that synthetic monolingual data can effectively enhance LLM performance in low‑resource languages and reveal the complex relationship between exam performance and practical NLP gains.
By Julian Valline, Cedric Lothritz, Siwen Guo, Jordi Cabot
arXiv:2609.07876v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent methods in language model interpretability employ techniques such as sparse autoencoders to decompose residual stream contributions into linea...
By Arjun Patrawala, Jiahai Feng, Erik Jones, Jacob Steinhardt
The paper introduces NegCue, a large-scale dataset of 1.8 million samples that includes single-word, multi-word, and affixal negation cues, totaling over 200 unique forms. The authors pre-train encoder-only language models and large language models on this dataset to study how different negation types influence understanding. Experiments on five downstream benchmarks reveal that affixal negations provide the most significant performance gains, whereas single-word negations yield modest improvements, and that additional pre-training benefits both model types.
By Tian Tan, Eduardo Blanco
arXiv:2606. 01252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-target cross-lingual text summarization (MTXLS), which summarizes a source document into multiple target languages, is increasingly important as users consume content in diverse languages, but remains underexplored.
By Sangwon Ryu, Yihong Liu, Mingyang Wang, Yunsu Kim, Jungseul Ok, Gary Geunbae Lee, Hinrich Schuetze