arXiv AI By Saman Rahbar

The Score Is Not the Structure: Brain Alignment and Cross-Lingual Transfer

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The paper investigates whether similarity scores truly reflect shared structure between language models and the brain or across languages. By removing the underlying structure or using a non‑functional instrument, the authors show that cross‑lingual transfer and brain alignment scores can remain high even when the supposed correspondence is destroyed. The study highlights that similarity metrics may be misleading and that careful validation is needed before interpreting them as evidence of shared structure.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

Lost in Translation: Why Lower Bias Scores Don't Mean Fairer Models

The paper investigates whether lower stereotype bias scores in multilingual language models truly indicate greater fairness. By auditing ten open models across eight languages, the authors show that lower average scores often arise from translation artifacts rather than genuine bias reduction, as item‑level correlations between English and translated scores are weak. They also identify pipeline errors that can mask bias signals and provide code to replicate their findings.

By Harsh Kumar
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Cross-lingual brain-language model alignment is robust but challenges hierarchical and computational accounts

The study examined whether brain-language model alignment reflects shared computational mechanisms or merely stable lexical‑semantic correspondences. Using whole‑brain encoding across Mandarin, English, and French, transformer representations predicted activity in a distributed network that overlapped across languages and remained stable across layers. Contextual embeddings and measures of prediction or compression did not outperform static lexical embeddings, suggesting that alignment is robust but not informative about shared computational processes.

By Ni Yang, Rui He, Philipp Homan, Iris Sommer, Davide Staub, Wolfram Hinzen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

The Alignment Illusion in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper investigates whether layer-wise visual‑text similarity in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) truly reflects content‑level cross‑modal interaction. By injecting Gaussian noise into the visual stream of 13 MLLMs, the authors show that task accuracy drops sharply while traditional scalar alignment metrics (CKA, SVCCA, MIR, principal‑angle cosine) fail to distinguish corrupted from clean inputs, a phenomenon they term the alignment illusion. They propose the principal‑angle gap (PA gap) as a more reliable geometric diagnostic that correlates better with task performance and reveals when internal geometry diverges from accuracy.

By Hong-Han Wang, Yuntao Wang, Hu Ding
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

Cognitive Expert Language Models Better Align with the Corresponding Brain Systems

The study investigates whether language models tailored to specific cognitive domains better align with corresponding brain systems. By prompting and fine‑tuning large language models into six domain experts—sensory, spatial, numerical, reasoning, social, and abstract—the authors find that each expert’s representations more closely match the brain region associated with its domain than other experts. This domain‑specific alignment holds across multiple base models and fMRI datasets, while overall prediction accuracy remains largely unchanged, indicating that regional alignment can be obscured when summarizing across the brain.

By Zhivar Sourati, Mengxuan Helen Wu, Nona Ghazizadeh, Jonas Kaplan, Morteza Dehghani, Samuel A. Nastase
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

IndicQE-APE: A Benchmark for Quality Estimation and Automatic Post-Editing for Indic Languages

IndicQE-APE is a consolidated benchmark that unifies quality estimation (QE) and automatic post‑editing (APE) data for nine Indic language pairs, comprising 126,754 instances with multiple aligned labels such as direct assessment, human post‑edit, word‑level OK/BAD tags, and error explanations. The dataset includes a stratified test set across four difficulty axes and supports training and evaluation of six prompted large language models, three COMET metrics, and three APE systems. Experiments reveal that segments with conflicting holistic and token‑level quality signals are consistently ranked lower, while annotator disagreement shows no effect when controlled for score distribution. whyItMatters":"The benchmark provides a unified resource for training and evaluating QE and APE across Indic languages, enabling consistent comparison of models and metrics on a shared dataset."

By Diptesh Kanojia, Archchana Sindhujan, Sourabh Deoghare, Daria Sokova, Shenbin Qian, Girish Koushik, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Constantin Or\u{a}san, Chrysoula Zerva, Ricardo Rei, Fr\'ed\'eric Blain, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Marco Turchi, Matteo Negri, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Mitesh M. Khapra, Pushpak Bhattacharyya