Papers with language alignment
Language Directions in Multilingual LLMs: A Layer-wise Diagnostic Study of Token Alignment and Pretraining Imprint (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Using a unified probing framework, we analyze six multilingual LLMs across five languages. |
| Approach: | They analyze multilingual representations across five languages and analyze their behavior . they find that accuracy rises by +73.5 to +80.7 points from L0 to L1 on average . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables a consistent and substantial early jump in accuracy across models . the token–language alignment measures where vocabulary sharing peaks . |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion with Self-Supervised Adaptive Graph Alignment (2022.acl-long)
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Zijie Huang, Zheng Li, Haoming Jiang, Tianyu Cao, Hanqing Lu, Bing Yin, Karthik Subbian, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict missing facts in knowledge graphs are limited in language alignment . SS-AGA uses seed alignment as an edge type to fuses all KGs as a whole graph . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised adaptive graph alignment method that fuses all KGs as a whole graph by regarding alignment as 'a new edge type' they propose SS-AGA method that uses relation-aware attention weights to capture potential alignment pairs in a new paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict missing facts in a knowledge graph (KG) but language alignment is scarce and new alignment identification is noisy. |
DM-BLI: Dynamic Multiple Subspaces Alignment for Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) fail on distant or low-resource language pairs, achieving less than half the performance observed in rich-resourced languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction that uses multiple subspace alignments instead of a single mapping. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 12 language pairs show that the proposed framework improves language alignment by utilizing multiple subspace alignments instead of a single mapping. |
Detect Rumors in Microblog Posts for Low-Resource Domains via Adversarial Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing rumor detection methods are poor at detecting false rumors about breaking news or trending topics due to the lack of training data and prior knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial contrastive learning framework to detect false rumors by adapting features learned from well-resourced rumor data to that of the low-resource. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two low-resource datasets and shows superior performance . it overcomes restriction of domain and/or language usage and improves robustness . |
CLICKER: Cross-Lingual Knowledge Editing via In-Context Learning with Adaptive Stepwise Reasoning (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods are static and fail to propagate edits across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a KE method that dynamically retrieves only knowledge relevant to a given query and edits it to maintain cross-lingual consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms static KE methods on a multilingual dataset with semantically similar but irrelevant prompts. |
VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have advanced rapidly, yet most remain English-centric . scaling multilingual multimodal instruction tuning is limited by the scarcity and high cost of non-English image–text supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment by composing complementary task vectors over a shared LLM backbone. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with a fully multimodally trained model using less than 2% of the text data. |
EntityCS: Improving Zero-Shot Cross-lingual Transfer with Entity-Centric Code Switching (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for CS use dictionaries or parallel sentences with word-alignment to generate CS data by randomly switching words in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that focuses on Entity-level Code-Switching to capture fine-grained cross-lingual semantics without corrupting syntax. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures fine-grained cross-lingual semantics without corrupting syntax. |
Investigating and Scaling up Code-Switching for Multilingual Language Model Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhijun Wang, Jiahuan Li, Hao Zhou, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite the extreme language imbalance in the pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They investigate the existence of code-switching in the pre-training corpus and categorize it into four types within two quadrants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance across benchmarks and representation space. |
ProtoCycle: Reflective Tool-Augmented Planning for Text-Guided Protein Design (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutang Ge, Guojiang Zhao, Sihang Li, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Hanchen Xia, Guolin Ke, Linfeng Zhang, Zhifeng Gao, Yu Guang Wang
| Challenge: | Recent deep generative models have already shown encouraging * Equal contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose to use generic instruction-tuned LLMs as direct text-to-sequence generators to achieve this goal. |
| Outcome: | Recent studies show that reflection improves sequence quality and alignment while maintaining competitive foldability. |
Improving Low-Resource Languages in Pre-Trained Multilingual Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained multilingual language models are the foundation of many NLP approaches, but are often not well-supported by these models due to small available monolingual corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach to improve cross-lingual representations of low-resource languages by bootstrapping word translation pairs from monolingual corpora and using them to improve language alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves cross-lingual representations on low-resource languages using word retrieval and zero-shot named entity recognition. |
Can Hallucination Correction Improve Video-Language Alignment? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on hallucination correction for large vision-language models focuses on mitigating hallucisations, but a new approach is needed to improve video-language alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-training framework learning to correct hallucinations in descriptions that do not align with the video content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves video-language alignment by identifying and correcting inconsistencies in descriptions that do not align with the video content. |
It’s All About In-Context Learning! Teaching Extremely Low-Resource Languages to LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource languages, especially those written in rare scripts, remain unsupported by large language models due to lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 20 under-represented languages across three state-of-the-art multilingual LLMs and compare their methods to parameter-efficient fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods compare with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) on low-resource languages. |
Mending the Holes: Mitigating Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Translation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models rely heavily on high-quality parallel data, which are often scarce or unavailable for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement training method using only monolingual text to elevate LLMs’ translation capabilities on massive low-resource languages while retaining their performance on high-resourced languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms LLaMAX, one of the strongest open-source multilingual LLMs on 1,414 language directions on Flores-101 dataset. |
LANG: Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Reasoning with Language-Adaptive Hint Guidance (2026.acl-long)
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Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Peiguang Li, Yilin Wang, Yongyu Mu, Jian Yang, Xin Chen, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing multi-step reasoning have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. |