Measuring Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer Across Diverse Languages

Conceitos Básicos

The study demonstrates that language models can effectively transfer knowledge across diverse languages, with the transfer being largely independent of language proximity. This suggests the presence of language-agnostic representations that enable cross-lingual generalization.

Resumo

The paper investigates the mechanisms behind cross-lingual transfer in language models, focusing on quantifying the amount of knowledge transferred from a source language to a target language. The key findings are:

When finetuning models initialized from different source languages on a target language, the performance is remarkably similar, even for linguistically distant language pairs. This suggests the models leverage language-agnostic representations beyond just language-specific knowledge.

The Data Transfer (DT) metric, which measures the additional data required for a from-scratch model to match the performance of a finetuned model, shows consistent values across diverse source languages for a given target. This further supports the hypothesis of language-agnostic representations.

The authors find weak correlations between DT and measures of language similarity, indicating that language proximity is not the primary driver of cross-lingual transfer.

Experiments with a controlled language pair (Portuguese-Spanish) confirm the presence of both language-specific and language-agnostic components in the learned representations.

The study provides a novel methodology for quantifying cross-lingual transfer using a byte-level tokenizer, which helps overcome challenges with subword tokenizers. The findings contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms behind the impressive cross-lingual capabilities of modern language models.

Estatísticas

The model requires approximately 6 billion tokens for pretraining in the source language.
Finetuning is performed on target language datasets ranging from 6 million to 6 billion tokens.

Citações

"Even when comparing linguistically distant languages, the data transfer metrics are of a comparable magnitude."
"This research contributes additional evidence supporting the language-agnostic hypothesis, which suggests that the internal representations developed by a model are not only influenced by the linguistic surface form but also by the cultural and semantic content of the training data."

Principais Insights Extraídos De

Measuring Cross-lingual Transfer in Bytes

by Leandro Rodr... às arxiv.org 04-15-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.08191.pdf

Perguntas Mais Profundas

How can the insights from this study be leveraged to develop more efficient and generalizable cross-lingual natural language understanding systems

The insights from this study can be instrumental in enhancing the development of more efficient and generalizable cross-lingual natural language understanding systems. By understanding the role of language-agnostic representations in facilitating knowledge transfer across diverse languages, researchers and developers can focus on refining these representations to improve model performance. Leveraging the findings, models can be designed to prioritize the extraction and utilization of language-agnostic components during pretraining and fine-tuning stages. This approach can lead to the creation of more adaptable and versatile models that can effectively handle various languages without extensive language-specific training data. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of utilizing byte-level tokenization to ensure consistent model embeddings across different scripts, further enhancing the generalizability of cross-lingual models.

What are the implications of the language-agnostic representations for downstream tasks beyond language modeling, such as cross-lingual transfer in low-resource settings

The implications of language-agnostic representations extend beyond language modeling tasks to downstream applications, particularly in low-resource settings where access to abundant labeled data is limited. By leveraging the language-agnostic knowledge acquired during pretraining, models can exhibit robust performance in cross-lingual transfer tasks even with minimal target language resources. This capability is crucial for applications such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition in under-resourced languages. The study suggests that models pretrained with diverse source languages can effectively transfer knowledge to target languages, enabling the development of more efficient and accurate cross-lingual systems in low-resource settings. This approach can significantly benefit tasks requiring cross-lingual understanding, offering improved performance and adaptability across languages.

Can the principles of language-agnostic and language-specific representations be extended to other modalities beyond text, such as speech or vision, to enable truly multimodal cross-lingual transfer

The principles of language-agnostic and language-specific representations can indeed be extended to other modalities beyond text, such as speech or vision, to enable multimodal cross-lingual transfer. By incorporating similar concepts of language-agnostic components in multimodal models, researchers can enhance the transferability of knowledge across different languages in diverse modalities. For speech recognition, models can be pretrained on multilingual speech datasets to capture language-agnostic features that aid in cross-lingual understanding and transcription. Similarly, in computer vision, models can be trained on diverse visual datasets to extract language-agnostic visual representations that facilitate cross-lingual image recognition and classification tasks. By integrating language-agnostic representations into multimodal systems, researchers can develop more versatile and adaptable models capable of understanding and processing information across languages and modalities effectively.