Multilingual Language Models

Ask about this topic

Overview

Multilingual language models study how systems can understand, reason, translate, and generate text across languages, including those with limited training data or distinct scripts. Common approaches include multilingual pretraining and data balancing, continued pretraining and instruction tuning, language-aware tokenization, and transfer methods such as shared representations, adapters, and mixture-of-experts models. Researchers evaluate performance with translation, comprehension, reasoning, and safety benchmarks, while probing internal representations and using inference-time steering to improve language control. A central tension is how to expand language coverage and transfer shared knowledge without degrading performance, reinforcing English or high-resource-language biases, or overlooking differences between languages and scripts.

Latest papers

CardsList

266 papers39 papers in the last four weeks, up 95% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Cross-Lingual Response Consistency in Large Language Models: An ILR-Informed Evaluation of Claude Across Six Languages

    Apr 29, 2026Camelia BalutaMultilingual Language ModelsMultilingual Language Model Evaluation

    Independent Researcher | Former Faculty, Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center · ILR/OPI Assessment Specialist

  2. TLPO: Token-Level Policy Optimization for Mitigating Language Confusion in Large Language Models

    Apr 29, 2026Jinho Choo, JunSeung Lee, Jimyeong Kim +3Multilingual Language ModelsRL for Language Models

    Samsung SDS

  3. Marco-MoE: Open Multilingual Mixture-of-Expert Language Models with Efficient Upcycling

    Apr 28, 2026Fan Jiang, Yu Zhao, Chenyang Lyu +5Multilingual Language ModelsMixture-of-Experts Language Models

    Alibaba International Digital Commerce

  4. XITE: Cross-lingual Interpolation for Transfer using Embeddings

    Apr 26, 2026Barah Fazili, Preethi JyothiMultilingual Language ModelsData Augmentation

    Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India

  5. Neural Recovery of Historical Lexical Structure in Bantu Languages from Modern Data

    Apr 24, 2026Hillary Mutisya, John MuganeMultilingual Language Models

    Thiomi NLP · Harvard University

  6. Multilinguality at the Edge: Developing Language Models for the Global South

    Apr 23, 2026Lester James V. Miranda, Songbo Hu, Roi Reichart +1Multilingual Language ModelsOn-Device Language Model Inference

    Language Technology Lab, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom · Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

  7. Language as a Latent Variable for Reasoning Optimization

    Apr 23, 2026Linjuan Wu, Haoran Wei, Jialong Tang +4Multilingual Language ModelsCross-Lingual Reasoning in Language Models

    Zhejiang University · Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Grou.

  8. AFRILANGTUTOR: Advancing Language Tutoring and Culture Education in Low-Resource Languages with Large Language Models

    Apr 22, 2026Tadesse Destaw Belay, Shahriar Kabir Nahin, Israel Abebe Azime +6Multilingual Language ModelsIntelligent Tutoring Systems

    Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico · University of South Florida, FL, USA · Saarland University, Germany +2

  9. COMPASS: COntinual Multilingual PEFT with Adaptive Semantic Sampling

    Apr 22, 2026Noah FlynnMultilingual Language ModelsContinual Learning for LLMs

    UC Berkeley

  10. Toward Cross-Lingual Quality Classifiers for Multilingual Pretraining Data Selection

    Apr 22, 2026Yassine Turki, Vinko Sabolčec, Bettina Messmer +1Language Model PretrainingMultilingual Language Models

    Machine Learning Optimization Lab Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Lausanne, Switzerland

  11. One Jailbreak, Many Tongues: Learning Language-Insensitive Intention Representations for Multilingual Jailbreak Detection

    Apr 22, 2026Shuyu Jiang, Kaiyu Xu, Xingshu Chen +5Multilingual Language ModelsBack-Translation

    School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University · School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, China

  12. Exploring Language-Agnosticity in Function Vectors: A Case Study in Machine Translation

    Apr 21, 2026Nurkhan Laiyk, Gerard I. Gállego, Javier Ferrando +1Multilingual Language ModelsTask Vectors

    Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · Cantina Labs

  13. Location Not Found: Exposing Implicit Local and Global Biases in Multilingual LLMs

    Apr 21, 2026Guy Mor-Lan, Omer Goldman, Matan Eyal +6Multilingual Language ModelsMultilingual Language Model Evaluation

    GGoogle Research · BBar-Ilan University · CUniversity of Cambridge +1

  14. Scripts Through Time: A Survey of the Evolving Role of Transliteration in NLP

    Apr 20, 2026Thanmay Jayakumar, Deepon Halder, Raj DabreMultilingual Language ModelsCross-Lingual Transfer

    Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat · Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India · Indian Institute of Engineering, Science and Technology, Shibpur

  15. Do LLMs Use Cultural Knowledge Without Being Told? A Multilingual Evaluation of Implicit Pragmatic Adaptation

    Apr 20, 2026Mehwish Nasim, Sanjeevan Selvaganapathy, Neel Ganapathi Sabhahit +6Multilingual Language ModelsMultilingual Language Model Evaluation

    1Network Analysis and Social Influence Modelling (NASIM) Lab · 3Computational Social Science & Systems Analysis University of Münster · School of Computing Macquarie University

  16. Copy First, Translate Later: Interpreting Translation Dynamics in Multilingual Pretraining

    Apr 19, 2026Felicia Körner, Maria Matveev, Florian Eichin +3Language Model PretrainingMultilingual Language Models

    MaiNLP, Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) · Department of Mathematics, LMU Munich, Germany +2

  17. x1: Learning to Think Adaptively Across Languages and Cultures

    Apr 18, 2026Yangfan Ye, Xiaocheng Feng, Xiachong Feng +8Multilingual Language ModelsCross-Lingual Reasoning in Language Models

    Harbin Institute of Technology · Peng Cheng Laboratory · The University of Hong Kong +1

  18. Defragmenting Language Models: An Interpretability-based Approach for Vocabulary Expansion

    Apr 17, 2026Maitrey Mehta, Nishant Subramani, Zhichao Xu +2Multilingual Language ModelsSubword Tokenization

    Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah · Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

  19. C-Mining: Unsupervised Discovery of Seeds for Cultural Data Synthesis via Geometric Misalignment

    Apr 17, 2026Pufan Zeng, Yilun Liu, Mingchen Dai +12Multilingual Language ModelsSynthetic Data Generation

    Huawei, China · Huawei, Canada

  20. Think Multilingual, Not Harder: A Data-Efficient Framework for Teaching Reasoning Models to Code-Switch

    Apr 16, 2026Eleanor M. Lin, David JurgensMultilingual Language ModelsCode-Switching

    University of Michigan

  21. Multilingual Multi-Label Emotion Classification at Scale with Synthetic Data

    Apr 14, 2026Vadim BorisovEmotion RecognitionMultilingual Text Classification

  22. ReasonXL: A Large-Scale Corpus for Language-Specific Reasoning in LLMs

    Apr 14, 2026Daniil Gurgurov, Tom Röhr, Sebastian von Rohrscheidt +3Cross-Lingual Reasoning in Language ModelsMultilingual Language Models

    German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarland University · Berliner Hochschule für Technik

  23. MIXAR: Scaling Autoregressive Pixel-based Language Models to Multiple Languages and Scripts

    Apr 13, 2026Chen Hu, Yintao Tai, Antonio Vergari +2Multilingual Language ModelsAutoregressive Language Modeling

    School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

  24. Polyglot Teachers: Evaluating Language Models for Multilingual Synthetic Data Generation

    Apr 13, 2026Lester James V. Miranda, Ivan Vulić, Anna KorhonenSupervised Fine-TuningMultilingual Language Models

    Language Technology Lab, University of Cambridge

  25. Computational Lesions in Multilingual Language Models Separate Shared and Language-specific Brain Alignment

    Apr 12, 2026Yang Cui, Jingyuan Sun, Yizheng Sun +8Neural EncodingMultilingual Language Models

    Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. · State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, CAS, Beijing, China. · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. +3

  26. Bridging Linguistic Gaps: Cross-Lingual Mapping in Pre-Training and Dataset for Enhanced Multilingual LLM Performance

    Apr 12, 2026Weihua Zheng, Chang Liu, Zhengyuan Liu +5Multilingual Language ModelsCross-Lingual Representation Alignment

    Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore · ByteDance, Singapore · Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore

  27. Claim2Vec: Embedding Fact-Check Claims for Multilingual Similarity and Clustering

    Apr 10, 2026Rrubaa Panchendrarajan, Arkaitz ZubiagaClaim VerificationMultilingual Language Models

    Queen Mary University of London

  28. Language Bias under Conflicting Information in Multilingual LLMs

    Apr 8, 2026Robert Östling, Murathan KurfalıLinguistic Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    Stockholm University Sweden · RISE Research Institutes of Sweden Sweden

  29. Multilingual Embedding Probes Fail to Generalize Across Learner Corpora

    Apr 8, 2026Laurits Lyngbaek, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlanLanguage Model ProbingCross-Dataset Generalization

    Aarhus University, Denmark

  30. Is Cross-Lingual Transfer in Bilingual Models Human-Like? A Study with Overlapping Word Forms in Dutch and English

    Apr 8, 2026Iza Škrjanec, Irene Elisabeth Winther, Vera Demberg +1Cross-Lingual TransferMultilingual Language Models

    Saarland University, Germany · Zuse School ELIZA, Germany · Radboud University, the Netherlands