CALM: Unleashing the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning Ability of Language Model Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Yumeng, Fan, Zhiyuan, Wang, Qingyun, Fung, May, Ji, Heng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Wang, Yumeng
Fan, Zhiyuan
Wang, Qingyun
Fung, May
Ji, Heng
author_facet Wang, Yumeng
Fan, Zhiyuan
Wang, Qingyun
Fung, May
Ji, Heng
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on extensive multilingual corpora to acquire both language-specific cultural knowledge and general knowledge. Ideally, while LLMs should provide consistent responses to culture-independent questions across languages, we observe significant performance disparities. To address this, we explore the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning ability of Language Models (CALM) to align knowledge across languages. Specifically, for a given question, we sample multiple responses across different languages and select the most self-consistent response as the target, leaving the remaining responses as negative examples. We then employ direct preference optimization (DPO) to align the model's knowledge across different languages. Evaluations on the MEDQA and X-CSQA datasets demonstrate CALM's effectiveness in enhancing cross-lingual knowledge question answering, both in zero-shot and retrieval-augmented settings. We also found that increasing the number of languages involved in CALM training leads to higher accuracy and consistency. We offer a qualitative analysis of how cross-lingual consistency can enhance knowledge alignment and explore the method's generalizability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_18457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CALM: Unleashing the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning Ability of Language Model Question Answering
Wang, Yumeng
Fan, Zhiyuan
Wang, Qingyun
Fung, May
Ji, Heng
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on extensive multilingual corpora to acquire both language-specific cultural knowledge and general knowledge. Ideally, while LLMs should provide consistent responses to culture-independent questions across languages, we observe significant performance disparities. To address this, we explore the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning ability of Language Models (CALM) to align knowledge across languages. Specifically, for a given question, we sample multiple responses across different languages and select the most self-consistent response as the target, leaving the remaining responses as negative examples. We then employ direct preference optimization (DPO) to align the model's knowledge across different languages. Evaluations on the MEDQA and X-CSQA datasets demonstrate CALM's effectiveness in enhancing cross-lingual knowledge question answering, both in zero-shot and retrieval-augmented settings. We also found that increasing the number of languages involved in CALM training leads to higher accuracy and consistency. We offer a qualitative analysis of how cross-lingual consistency can enhance knowledge alignment and explore the method's generalizability.
title CALM: Unleashing the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning Ability of Language Model Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18457