Recent work has proposed explicitly inducing language-wise modularity in multilingual LMs via sparse fine-tuning (SFT) on per-language subnetworks as a means of better guiding cross-lingual sharing. In this work, we investigate (1) the degree to which language-wise modularity naturally arises within models with no special modularity interventions, and (2) how cross-lingual sharing and interference differ between such models and those with explicit SFT-guided subnetwork modularity. To quantify language specialization and cross-lingual interaction, we use a Training Data Attribution method that estimates the degree to which a model's predictions are influenced by in-language or cross-language training examples. Our results show that language-specialized subnetworks do naturally arise, and that SFT, rather than always increasing modularity, can decrease language specialization of subnetworks in favor of more cross-lingual sharing.
@article{arxiv.2311.08273,
title = {Examining Modularity in Multilingual LMs via Language-Specialized Subnetworks},
author = {Rochelle Choenni and Ekaterina Shutova and Dan Garrette},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.08273},
year = {2023}
}