LayAlign: Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning in Large Language Models via Layer-Wise Adaptive Fusion and Alignment Strategy
Zhiwen Ruan, Yixia Li, He Zhu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen
Abstract
Despite being pretrained on multilingual corpora, large language models (LLMs) exhibit suboptimal performance on low-resource languages. Recent approaches have leveraged multilingual encoders alongside LLMs by introducing trainable parameters connecting the two models. However, these methods typically focus on the encoder’s output, overlooking valuable information from other layers. We propose Layer-Wise Adaptive Fusion and Alignment Strategy (LayAlign), a framework that integrates representations from all encoder layers, coupled with the adaptive fusion-enhanced attention mechanism to enable layer-wise interaction between the LLM and the multilingual encoder. Extensive experiments on multilingual reasoning tasks, along with analyses of learned representations, show that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ruan-etal-2025-layalign,
title = "{L}ay{A}lign: Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning in Large Language Models via Layer-Wise Adaptive Fusion and Alignment Strategy",
author = "Ruan, Zhiwen and
Li, Yixia and
Zhu, He and
Wang, Longyue and
Luo, Weihua and
Zhang, Kaifu and
Chen, Yun and
Chen, Guanhua",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-naacl.81/",
pages = "1481--1495",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-195-7"
}