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arXiv · 2503.17456

Language-specific Neurons Do Not Facilitate Cross-Lingual Transfer

Soumen Kumar Mondal·Sayambhu Sen·Abhishek Singhania·Preethi Jyothi
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Abstract

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) aim towards robust natural language understanding across diverse languages, yet their performance significantly degrades on low-resource languages. This work explores whether existing techniques to identify language-specific neurons can be leveraged to enhance cross-lingual task performance of lowresource languages. We conduct detailed experiments covering existing language-specific neuron identification techniques (such as Language Activation Probability Entropy and activation probability-based thresholding) and neuron-specific LoRA fine-tuning with models like Llama 3.1 and Mistral Nemo. We find that such neuron-specific interventions are insufficient to yield cross-lingual improvements on downstream tasks (XNLI, XQuAD) in lowresource languages. This study highlights the challenges in achieving cross-lingual generalization and provides critical insights for multilingual LLMs.

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Soumen Kumar Mondal, Sayambhu Sen, Abhishek Singhania, Preethi Jyothi. 2025-03-21. Language-specific Neurons Do Not Facilitate Cross-Lingual Transfer. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17456

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