Concept Space Alignment in Multilingual LLMs

Qiwei Peng; Anders Søgaard

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arXiv · 2410.01079

Concept Space Alignment in Multilingual LLMs

Qiwei Peng·Anders Søgaard

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Abstract

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) seem to generalize somewhat across languages. We hypothesize this is a result of implicit vector space alignment. Evaluating such alignment, we see that larger models exhibit very high-quality linear alignments between corresponding concepts in different languages. Our experiments show that multilingual LLMs suffer from two familiar weaknesses: generalization works best for languages with similar typology, and for abstract concepts. For some models, e.g., the Llama-2 family of models, prompt-based embeddings align better than word embeddings, but the projections are less linear -- an observation that holds across almost all model families, indicating that some of the implicitly learned alignments are broken somewhat by prompt-based methods.

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Qiwei Peng, Anders Søgaard. 2024-10-01. Concept Space Alignment in Multilingual LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01079

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