{"ID":2879168,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17078","arxiv_id":"2508.17078","title":"Linguistic Neuron Overlap Patterns to Facilitate Cross-lingual Transfer on Low-resource Languages","abstract":"The current Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges in improving their performance on low-resource languages and urgently need data-efficient methods without costly fine-tuning. From the perspective of language-bridge, we propose a simple yet effective method, namely BridgeX-ICL, to improve the zero-shot Cross-lingual In-Context Learning (X-ICL) for low-resource languages. Unlike existing works focusing on language-specific neurons, BridgeX-ICL explores whether sharing neurons can improve cross-lingual performance in LLMs. We construct neuron probe data from the ground-truth MUSE bilingual dictionaries, and define a subset of language overlap neurons accordingly to ensure full activation of these anchored neurons. Subsequently, we propose an HSIC-based metric to quantify LLMs' internal linguistic spectrum based on overlapping neurons, guiding optimal bridge selection. The experiments conducted on 4 cross-lingual tasks and 15 language pairs from 7 diverse families, covering both high-low and moderate-low pairs, validate the effectiveness of BridgeX-ICL and offer empirical insights into the underlying multilingual mechanisms of LLMs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/xuyuemei/BridgeX-ICL.","short_abstract":"The current Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges in improving their performance on low-resource languages and urgently need data-efficient methods without costly fine-tuning. From the perspective of language-bridge, we propose a simple yet effective method, namely BridgeX-ICL, to improve the zero-sh...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17078","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17078v2","authors":"[\"Yuemei Xu\",\"Kexin Xu\",\"Jian Zhou\",\"Ling Hu\",\"Lin Gui\"]","published":"2025-08-23T16:13:57Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false,"code_links":[{"ID":610564,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_id":2879168,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17078","paper_title":"Linguistic Neuron Overlap Patterns to Facilitate Cross-lingual Transfer on Low-resource Languages","repo_url":"https://github.com/xuyuemei/BridgeX-ICL","is_official":false,"mentioned_in_paper":false,"mentioned_in_github":true,"github_stars":0}]}