Selected Languages are All You Need for Cross-lingual Truthfulness Transfer

Weihao Liu, Ning Wu, Wenbiao Ding, Shining Liang, Ming Gong, Dongmei Zhang


Abstract
Truthfulness stands out as an essential challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). Although many works have developed various ways for truthfulness enhancement, they seldom focus on truthfulness in multilingual scenarios. Meanwhile, contemporary multilingual aligning technologies struggle to balance massive languages and often exhibit serious truthfulness gaps across different languages, especially those that differ greatly from English. In our work, we extend truthfulness evaluation to multilingual contexts and propose a practical method for cross-lingual truthfulness transfer called Fact-aware Multilingual Selective Synergy (FaMSS). FaMSS is able to select an optimal subset of all tested languages by language bias and transfer contributions, and then employ translation instruction tuning for cross-lingual truthfulness transfer. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can effectively reduce the multilingual representation disparity and boost cross-lingual truthfulness transfer of LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.601
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8963–8978
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.601/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weihao Liu, Ning Wu, Wenbiao Ding, Shining Liang, Ming Gong, and Dongmei Zhang. 2025. Selected Languages are All You Need for Cross-lingual Truthfulness Transfer. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8963–8978, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Selected Languages are All You Need for Cross-lingual Truthfulness Transfer (Liu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.601.pdf