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Cross-Lingual Alignment Without Joint Training: Do Monolingual Language Models Converge on Universal Representations?

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TL;DR - Independently trained monolingual language models develop cross-lingually alignable internal representations without shared training data or explicit alignment objectives. This suggests language structure itself may enable modular multilingual systems assembled from monolingual models.

  • Alignment strengthens with greater data and model scale, as well as closer linguistic similarity.
  • A single Procrustes rotation learned from parallel sentences can map hidden states between models.
  • Rotated English residual states patched into a German model transferred factual content, often changing its cloze prediction to the English donor model’s answer.
  • The findings point toward model stitching, merging, and modular multilingual architectures.

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Cross-Lingual Alignment Without Joint Training: Do Monolingual Language Models Converge on Universal Representations?

arXiv cs.CL Ej Zhou, Suchir Salhan, Catherine Arnett, Anna Korhonen 2026-08-27 arXiv:2608.27115
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 1 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 1 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-09 14:14:21.428422 UTC

TL;DR - Independently trained monolingual language models develop cross-lingually alignable internal representations without shared training data or explicit alignment objectives. This suggests language structure itself may enable modular multilingual systems assembled from monolingual models.

  • Alignment strengthens with greater data and model scale, as well as closer linguistic similarity.
  • A single Procrustes rotation learned from parallel sentences can map hidden states between models.
  • Rotated English residual states patched into a German model transferred factual content, often changing its cloze prediction to the English donor model’s answer.
  • The findings point toward model stitching, merging, and modular multilingual architectures.
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