arXiv · 2611.03317
Steering with Multilingual Lexicons for Sentiment Control in Low-Resource Languages
Abstract
Activation steering offers a lightweight mechanism for controlling model behavior, but existing methods depend on sentence-level contrastive data that is unavailable for most of the world's languages. We show that multilingual sentiment lexicons are a viable substitute across three model families: aggregated multilingual lexicons outperform English-derived steering vectors for mid- and low-resource languages, while monolingual lexicons remain stronger for languages a model has specialized in during pre-training. The steering efficacy is mechanistically dictated by both representational density and pre-training priors. Large-magnitude English vectors overwhelm the compact representations of low-resource languages, causing "linguistic collapse." This fragility is mitigated by the norm-dampening of multilingual aggregation. Architectural biases, including bilingual specialization penalty and latent numerical rigidity, also heavily constrain cross-lingual steering responsiveness. Ultimately, our work establishes lexicons as a practical steering signal and offers a comprehensive mechanistic account of cross-lingual steering dynamics.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Lucinda Laurent, Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar, Alfan Farizki Wicaksono, Fajri Koto. 2026-11-02. Steering with Multilingual Lexicons for Sentiment Control in Low-Resource Languages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03317
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.