Bridging the English-Arabic Medical Knowledge Gap: Targeted Low-Rank Adaptation via Causal Layer Selection
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform strongly in English medical tasks but degrade substantially in Arabic, a gap widely attributed to limited training data. We systematically investigate this assumption via tuned lens probing and causal activation patching, and find that Arabic medical knowledge is present in intermediate model representations but fails to surface at the output. This mechanistic insight motivates a targeted adaptation strategy: rather than fine-tuning the full network, we propose Targeted Low-Rank Adaptation (TLoRA), restricted to the layer window where cross-lingual representations diverge, upstream of the output layers where the failure manifests. We evaluate TLoRA on ...
| Authors | Chaimae Abouzahir, Musa Khan, Hala Ali-Hassan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 31 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.