How do languages influence each other? Studying cross-lingual data sharing during LM fine-tuning

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Choenni, Rochelle, Garrette, Dan, Shutova, Ekaterina
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866929349476745216
author Choenni, Rochelle
Garrette, Dan
Shutova, Ekaterina
author_facet Choenni, Rochelle
Garrette, Dan
Shutova, Ekaterina
contents Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) are jointly trained on data from many different languages such that representation of individual languages can benefit from other languages' data. Impressive performance on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer shows that these models are capable of exploiting data from other languages. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent, and under which conditions, languages rely on each other's data. In this study, we use TracIn (Pruthi et al., 2020), a training data attribution (TDA) method, to retrieve the most influential training samples seen during multilingual fine-tuning for a particular test language. This allows us to analyse cross-lingual sharing mechanisms of MLLMs from a new perspective. While previous work studied cross-lingual sharing at the level of model parameters, we present the first approach to study cross-lingual sharing at the data level. We find that MLLMs rely on data from multiple languages from the early stages of fine-tuning and that this reliance gradually increases as fine-tuning progresses. We further study how different fine-tuning languages influence model performance on a given test language and find that they can both reinforce and complement the knowledge acquired from data of the test language itself.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_13286
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How do languages influence each other? Studying cross-lingual data sharing during LM fine-tuning
Choenni, Rochelle
Garrette, Dan
Shutova, Ekaterina
Computation and Language
Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) are jointly trained on data from many different languages such that representation of individual languages can benefit from other languages' data. Impressive performance on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer shows that these models are capable of exploiting data from other languages. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent, and under which conditions, languages rely on each other's data. In this study, we use TracIn (Pruthi et al., 2020), a training data attribution (TDA) method, to retrieve the most influential training samples seen during multilingual fine-tuning for a particular test language. This allows us to analyse cross-lingual sharing mechanisms of MLLMs from a new perspective. While previous work studied cross-lingual sharing at the level of model parameters, we present the first approach to study cross-lingual sharing at the data level. We find that MLLMs rely on data from multiple languages from the early stages of fine-tuning and that this reliance gradually increases as fine-tuning progresses. We further study how different fine-tuning languages influence model performance on a given test language and find that they can both reinforce and complement the knowledge acquired from data of the test language itself.
title How do languages influence each other? Studying cross-lingual data sharing during LM fine-tuning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13286