How Programming Concepts and Neurons Are Shared in Code Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Several studies have focused on programming languages in a monolingual setting, but most focus on programming language models. |
| Approach: | They perform a few-shot translation task on 21 PL pairs using two Llama-based models and decode the embeddings of intermediate layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model assigns high probability to English tokens in the second half of the intermediate layers and language-specific neurons are concentrated in the bottom layers . the model's concept space is closer to English (including PL keywords) and the model is more efficient at identifying language-related neurons. |
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Tianyi Tang, Wenyang Luo, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xiaolei Wang, Xin Zhao, Furu Wei, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Despite the impressive multilingual capabilities demonstrated by LLMs, the understanding of how these abilities develop and function remains nascent. |
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Converging to a Lingua Franca: Evolution of Linguistic Regions and Semantics Alignment in Multilingual Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that large language models can transfer skills learned in one language to others, but internal mechanisms behind this ability remain unclear. |
| Approach: | They find that LLMs map semantically identical inputs from different languages into a common semantic latent space that allows for consistent processing across languages. |
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Large Language Models Share Representations of Latent Grammatical Concepts Across Typologically Diverse Languages (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | In the brains of human bilinguals, syntax processing may occur in similar regions for their first and second language, depending on factors like when the second language was learned and language proficiency. |
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Does Large Language Model Contain Task-Specific Neurons? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehensively handling various types of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for task-specific neuron localization based on Causal Gradient Variation with Special Tokens (CGVST) this method identifies task- specific neurons by concentrating on the most significant tokens during task processing, eliminating redundant tokens and minimizing interference from non-essential neurons. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest a processing framework for multilingual inputs in decoder-based LLMs. |
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On the Multilingual Ability of Decoder-based Pre-trained Language Models: Finding and Controlling Language-Specific Neurons (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing decoder-based pre-trained language models demonstrate excellent multilingual capabilities, but it is unclear how they handle multilingualism. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the neuron-level internal behavior of decoder-based PLMs by finding neurons that fire “uniquely for each language” within decoded PLM models. |
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Concept Space Alignment in Multilingual LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual large language models generalize somewhat across languages, but it is unclear whether this is a result of improved, implicit alignment, or of something else, e.g., linguistic overlap or semi-parallel subsets of training data. |
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Exploring Concept Depth: How Large Language Models Acquire Knowledge and Concept at Different Layers? (2025.coling-main)
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Mingyu Jin, Qinkai Yu, Jingyuan Huang, Qingcheng Zeng, Zhenting Wang, Wenyue Hua, Haiyan Zhao, Kai Mei, Yanda Meng, Kaize Ding, Fan Yang, Mengnan Du, Yongfeng Zhang
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From Neurons to Semantics: Evaluating Cross-Linguistic Alignment Capabilities of Large Language Models via Neurons Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment benchmarks focus on sentence embeddings, but prior research has shown that neural models tend to induce a non-smooth representation space, which impact of semantic alignment evaluation on low-resource languages. |
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When Meanings Meet: Investigating the Emergence and Quality of Shared Concept Spaces during Multilingual Language Model Training (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that Large Language Models process multilingual inputs in shared concept spaces, thought to support generalization and cross-lingual transfer. |
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