A Universal Vibe? Finding and Controlling Language-Agnostic Informal Register with SAEs
While multilingual language models successfully transfer factual and syntactic knowledge across languages, it remains unclear whether they process culture-specific pragmatic registers, such as slang, as isolated language-specific memorizations or as unified, abstract concepts. We study this by probing the internal representations of Gemma-2-9B-IT using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) across three typologically diverse source languages: English, Hebrew, and Russian. To definitively isolate pragmatic register processing from trivial lexical sensitivity, we introduce a novel dataset in which every target term is polysemous, appearing in both literal and informal contexts. We find that while much ...
| Authors | Uri Z. Kialy, Avi Shtarkberg, Ayal Klein |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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