Linguistic Neuron Overlap Patterns to Facilitate Cross-lingual Transfer on Low-resource Languages

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17078v2
• Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2025 14:02:49 GMT
• Title: Linguistic Neuron Overlap Patterns to Facilitate Cross-lingual Transfer on Low-resource Languages
• Authors: Yuemei Xu, Kexin Xu, Jian Zhou, Ling Hu, Lin Gui,
• Abstract summary: We propose a simple yet effective method, namely BridgeX-ICL, to improve the zero-shot Cross-lingual In-Context Learning.<n>Unlike existing works focusing on language-specific neurons, BridgeX-ICL explores whether sharing neurons can improve cross-lingual performance.<n>We propose an HSIC-based metric to quantify LLMs' internal linguistic spectrum based on overlapping neurons, guiding optimal bridge selection.
• Score: 13.053383340899067
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The current Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges in improving their performance on low-resource languages and urgently need data-efficient methods without costly fine-tuning. From the perspective of language-bridge, we propose a simple yet effective method, namely BridgeX-ICL, to improve the zero-shot Cross-lingual In-Context Learning (X-ICL) for low-resource languages. Unlike existing works focusing on language-specific neurons, BridgeX-ICL explores whether sharing neurons can improve cross-lingual performance in LLMs. We construct neuron probe data from the ground-truth MUSE bilingual dictionaries, and define a subset of language overlap neurons accordingly to ensure full activation of these anchored neurons. Subsequently, we propose an HSIC-based metric to quantify LLMs' internal linguistic spectrum based on overlapping neurons, guiding optimal bridge selection. The experiments conducted on 4 cross-lingual tasks and 15 language pairs from 7 diverse families, covering both high-low and moderate-low pairs, validate the effectiveness of BridgeX-ICL and offer empirical insights into the underlying multilingual mechanisms of LLMs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/xuyuemei/BridgeX-ICL.

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