Accepted to ACL SRW 2025
Authors: Tim Chou, George Liu
Deterministically controlling the target generation language of large multilingual language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in zero-shot settings where neither explicit language prompts nor fine-tuning are available. We investigate whether sparse autoencoder (SAE) features can be leveraged to steer the generated language of LLMs during inference. Using pretrained SAEs on the residual streams of Gemma-2B and Gemma-9B, we identify features whose activations differ most significantly between English and four target languages: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and French. By modifying just a single SAE feature at one transformer layer, we achieve controlled language shifts with up to 90% success, as measured by FastText language classification, while preserving semantic fidelity according to LaBSE similarity.
