Are Knowledge and Reference in Multilingual Language Models Cross-Lingually Consistent?

Abstract: Cross-lingual consistency should be considered to assess cross-lingual transferability, maintain the factuality of the model knowledge across languages, and preserve the parity of LLM performance. We are thus interested in analyzing, evaluating, and interpreting cross-lingual consistency for factual knowledge. We examine code-mixed coreferential statements conveyed identical knowledge across languages to study cross-lingual knowledge consistency. We use some interpretability approaches to analyze the behavior of a model in cross-lingual contexts, discovering that multilingual models show different levels of consistency, subject to language families, linguistic factors, and a bottleneck in cross-lingual consistency on a particular layer. In addition, we evaluate common strategies aimed at improving multilingual performance to observe whether these strategies can improve knowledge consistency at the same time. While knowledge is not cross-lingual consistency in many cases, code-switching training and cross-lingual word alignment objectives show the most promising results, emphasizing the noteworthiness of cross-lingual alignment supervision and code-switching training for both multilingual performance and cross-lingual consistency enhancement.