Tracing Stereotypes from Representation to Output in Multilingual LLMs

Abstract:Multilingual LLMs show stereotype-related behavior that varies across languages, but behavioral scores do not show where the relevant information is represented or how it affects the output. To investigate these internal mechanisms, we compare linear probing, attribution patching, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and feature ablation in Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen3-8B, and Gemma-2-9B. Probe performance peaks substantially earlier than attribution in all three models, with a separation of 36-53% of model depth. Retained Llama-Scope features often match the social category on which they were selected and form recurring semantic families, but their lexical alignment and ablation effects vary across SAE suites. Only 6-18% of evaluated residual-stream features have language-agnostic effects under our criterion, and none are category-agnostic. Language-agnostic features have larger mean ablation effects in Llama-Scope, but this pattern does not repeat in the other SAE suites. Decodability, output influence, and cross-lingual ablation effects therefore need to be measured separately.

18 pages total (9 pages main text), 13 figures. Accepted to EMNLP 2026

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.08322 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.08322v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08322 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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