Explainability and Interpretability of Multilingual Large Language Models: A Survey

Lucas Resck, Isabelle Augenstein, Anna Korhonen


Abstract
Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate state-of-the-art capabilities across diverse cross-lingual and multilingual tasks. Their complex internal mechanisms, however, often lack transparency, posing significant challenges in elucidating their internal processing of multilingualism, cross-lingual transfer dynamics and handling of language-specific features. This paper addresses this critical gap by presenting a survey of current explainability and interpretability methods specifically for MLLMs. To our knowledge, it is the first comprehensive review of its kind. Existing literature is categorised according to the explainability techniques employed, the multilingual tasks addressed, the languages investigated and available resources. The survey further identifies key challenges, distils core findings and outlines promising avenues for future research within this rapidly evolving domain.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1033
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
20465–20497
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1033/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lucas Resck, Isabelle Augenstein, and Anna Korhonen. 2025. Explainability and Interpretability of Multilingual Large Language Models: A Survey. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 20465–20497, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explainability and Interpretability of Multilingual Large Language Models: A Survey (Resck et al., EMNLP 2025)
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