@inproceedings{rahmanisa-etal-2025-unveiling,
    title = "Unveiling the Influence of Amplifying Language-Specific Neurons",
    author = "Rahmanisa, Inaya  and
      Andrylie, Lyzander Marciano  and
      Ihsani, Mahardika Krisna  and
      Wicaksono, Alfan Farizki  and
      Wibowo, Haryo Akbarianto  and
      Aji, Alham Fikri",
    editor = "Inui, Kentaro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Wang, Haofen  and
      Wong, Derek F.  and
      Bhattacharyya, Pushpak  and
      Banerjee, Biplab  and
      Ekbal, Asif  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Singh, Dhirendra Pratap",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.55/",
    pages = "919--968",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-303-6",
    abstract = "Language-specific neurons, units in LLMs that strongly correlate with individual languages have been shown to influence model behavior by deactivating them. However, their role in amplification remains underexplored.This work investigates the effect of amplifying language-specific neurons through interventions across 18 languages, including low-resource ones, using three models primarily trained in different languages. We compare amplification factors by their effectiveness in steering to the target language using a proposed Language Steering Shift (LSS) evaluation score, then evaluate it on downstream tasks: commonsense reasoning (XCOPA, XWinograd), knowledge (Include), and translation (FLORES). The optimal amplification steering factors effectively steer output toward nearly all tested languages. Intervention using this factor on downstream tasks improves self-language performance in some cases but generally degrades cross-language results. These findings highlight the effect of language-specific neurons in multilingual behavior, where amplification can be beneficial especially for low-resource languages, but provides limited advantage for cross-lingual transfer."
}