Lingua Franca or Probing Artifact? Rethinking Latent Language in Multilingual LLMs

arXiv:2609.00155 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-31 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-31

Updated: 2026-08-31

Code: https://github.com/bayazitdeniz/latent-lid

Terminology

• Accuracy — 5× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Transformer — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Aggregation — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Instruction Tuning — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Low-Resource Languages — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Perplexity — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Tokenization — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Activation Patching — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Decode — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Regularization — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Aya 23: Open Weight Releases to Further Multilingual Progress
• Eliciting Latent Predictions from Transformers with the Tuned Lens
• Revisiting Multilingual Data Mixtures in Language Model Pretraining
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• EuroLLM-9B: Technical Report
• Do LLMs Need to Think in One Language? Correlation between Latent Language and Task Performance
• Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models

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