Haichao Du

Xin Liu, Qiyang Song, Qihang Zhou et al.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support multilingual understanding and generation. Meanwhile, efforts to interpret their internal mechanisms have emerged, offering insights to enhance multilingual performance. While multi-head self-attention (MHA) has proven critical in many areas, its role in multilingual capabilities remains underexplored. In this work, we study the contribution of MHA in supporting multilingual processing in LLMs. We propose Language Attention Head Importance Scores (LAHIS), an effective and efficient method that identifies attention head importance for multilingual capabilities via a single forward and backward pass through the LLM. Applying LAHIS to Aya-23-8B, Llama-3.2-3B, and Mistral-7B-v0.1, we reveal the existence of both language-specific and language-general heads. Language-specific heads enable cross-lingual attention transfer to guide the model toward target language contexts and mitigate off-target language generation issue, contributing to addressing challenges in multilingual LLMs. We also introduce a lightweight adaptation that learns a soft head mask to modulate attention outputs over language heads, requiring only 20 tunable parameters to improve XQuAD accuracy. Overall, our work enhances both the interpretability and multilingual capabilities of LLMs from the perspective of MHA.

Xiaoqi Jia, Jianwei Tai, Hang Zhou et al.

Despite the remarkable progress made in synthesizing emotional speech from text, it is still challenging to provide emotion information to existing speech segments. Previous methods mainly rely on parallel data, and few works have studied the generalization ability for one model to transfer emotion information across different languages. To cope with such problems, we propose an emotion transfer system named ET-GAN, for learning language-independent emotion transfer from one emotion to another without parallel training samples. Based on cycle-consistent generative adversarial network, our method ensures the transfer of only emotion information across speeches with simple loss designs. Besides, we introduce an approach for migrating emotion information across different languages by using transfer learning. The experiment results show that our method can efficiently generate high-quality emotional speech for any given emotion category, without aligned speech pairs.