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arxiv 2404.02431 v1 pith:AC3JS66R submitted 2024-04-03 cs.CL

On the Multilingual Ability of Decoder-based Pre-trained Language Models: Finding and Controlling Language-Specific Neurons

classification cs.CL
keywords neuronsmodelslanguagemultilingualdecoder-basedlanguage-specificlanguagesplms
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Current decoder-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) successfully demonstrate multilingual capabilities. However, it is unclear how these models handle multilingualism. We analyze the neuron-level internal behavior of multilingual decoder-based PLMs, Specifically examining the existence of neurons that fire ``uniquely for each language'' within decoder-only multilingual PLMs. We analyze six languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese, and show that language-specific neurons are unique, with a slight overlap (< 5%) between languages. These neurons are mainly distributed in the models' first and last few layers. This trend remains consistent across languages and models. Additionally, we tamper with less than 1% of the total neurons in each model during inference and demonstrate that tampering with a few language-specific neurons drastically changes the probability of target language occurrence in text generation.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Exploring Cross-lingual Latent Transplantation: Mutual Opportunities and Open Challenges

    cs.CL 2024-12 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    XTransplant empirically shows that cross-lingual latent transplantation yields mutual benefits for multilingual capability and cultural adaptability in LLMs, especially low-resource ones, while revealing underutilized...

  2. Mix-MoE: Improving Multilingual Machine Translation of Large Language Models through Mixed MoEs

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Mix-MoE applies separate LM and MT expert groups in two post-pretraining stages with Fourier-enhanced routing to reduce parameter interference and improve multilingual MT over baselines.