Can Dialects Be Steered Like Languages? Sparse Neurons and Distributed Directions in Arabic LLMs
Dialectal data are scarce relative to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), causing Arabic LLMs to overproduce MSA and struggle with dialectally accurate generation. This raises a fundamental interpretability question about where and how dialectal features are encoded within model internals and whether these representations can improve dialect generation without fine-tuning. We study two inference-time approaches as interpretability probes and control mechanisms. First, neuron-level analysis identifies sparse populations that encode dialect-specific features and tests whether amplifying or suppressing them steers model outputs toward target dialects. Second, vector steering extracts dialect-speci...
| Authors | Kareem Elozeiri, Mervat Abassy, Omar Kallas et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 September 2026 |
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