Improving In-context Learning of Multilingual Generative Language Models with Cross-lingual Alignment

Abstract: Multilingual generative models obtain remarkable cross-lingual in-context learning capabilities through pre-training on large-scale corpora. However, they still exhibit a performance bias toward high-resource languages and learn isolated distributions of multilingual sentence representations, which may hinder knowledge transfer across languages. To bridge this gap, we propose a simple yet effective cross-lingual alignment framework exploiting pairs of translation sentences. It aligns the internal sentence representations across different languages via multilingual contrastive learning and aligns outputs by following cross-lingual instructions in the target language. Experimental results show that even with less than 0.1 {\textperthousand} of pre-training tokens, our alignment framework significantly boosts the cross-lingual abilities of generative LLMs and mitigates the performance gap. Further analyses reveal that it results in a better internal multilingual representation distribution of multilingual models.