@inproceedings{tezuka-inoue-2025-transfer,
    title = "The Transfer Neurons Hypothesis: An Underlying Mechanism for Language Latent Space Transitions in Multilingual {LLM}s",
    author = "Tezuka, Hinata  and
      Inoue, Naoya",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.emnlp-main.1618/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1618",
    pages = "31730--31780",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Recent studies have suggested a processing framework for multilingual inputs in decoder-based LLMs: early layers convert inputs into English-centric and language-agnostic representations; middle layers perform reasoning within an English-centric latent space; and final layers generate outputs by transforming these representations back into language-specific latent spaces.However, the internal dynamics of such transformation and the underlying mechanism remain underexplored.Towards a deeper understanding of this framework, we propose and empirically validate **The Transfer Neurons Hypothesis**: certain neurons in the MLP module are responsible for transferring representations between language-specific latent spaces and a shared semantic latent space.Furthermore, we show that one function of language-specific neurons, as identified in recent studies, is to facilitate movement between latent spaces.Finally, we show that transfer neurons are critical for reasoning in multilingual LLMs"
}