{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-the-multilingual-ability-of-decoder-based","title":"On the Multilingual Ability of Decoder-based Pre-trained Language Models: Finding and Controlling Language-Specific Neurons","arxiv_id":"2404.02431","date":"2024-04-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Takeshi Kojima","Itsuki Okimura","Yusuke Iwasawa","Hitomi Yanaka","Yutaka Matsuo"],"abstract":"Current decoder-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) successfully demonstrate multilingual capabilities. However, it is unclear how these models handle multilingualism. We analyze the neuron-level internal behavior of multilingual decoder-based PLMs, Specifically examining the existence of neurons that fire ``uniquely for each language'' within decoder-only multilingual PLMs. We analyze six languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese, and show that language-specific neurons are unique, with a slight overlap (< 5%) between languages. These neurons are mainly distributed in the models' first and last few layers. This trend remains consistent across languages and models. Additionally, we tamper with less than 1% of the total neurons in each model during inference and demonstrate that tampering with a few language-specific neurons drastically changes the probability of target language occurrence in text generation.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02431v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.02431v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-the-multilingual-ability-of-decoder-based","repo_url":"https://github.com/kojima-takeshi188/lang_neuron","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2404.02431","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}