Positional Cognitive Specialization: Where Do LLMs Learn To Comprehend and Speak Your Language?
Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages is an expensive and opaque process. Understanding how language models acquire new languages and multilingual abilities is key to achieve efficient adaptation. Prior work on multilingual interpretability research focuses primarily on how trained models process multilingual instructions, leaving unexplored the mechanisms through which they acquire new languages during training. We investigate these training dynamics on decoder-only transformers through the lens of two functional cognitive specializations: language perception (input comprehension) and production (output generation). Through experiments on low-resource languages, we demon...
| Authors | Luis Frentzen Salim, Lun-Wei Ku, Hsing-Kuo Kenneth Pao |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 April 2026 |
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