Where Are Language-Specific Features Represented in Multilingual LLMs? Everywhere
Previous work has argued that multilingual LLMs encode language-specific features most strongly in their initial and final layers, implying that intermediate layers support language-agnostic representations. This paper reconsiders this finding by performing four different experiments: three that undertake a fine-grained analysis of representations of Portuguese and Spanish, two closely related languages, and one large-scale language identification experiment that covers over 200 languages. The results of these experiments challenge the strict separation between language-specific and language-agnostic layers in multilingual LLMs, using Llama 3.2 1B as a test case. By analyzing and manipula...
| Authors | Mikaela Martins, Jonathan Dunn |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 October 2026 |
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