Explainability and Interpretability of Multilingual Large Language Models: A Survey

Lucas Resck, Isabelle Augenstein, Anna Korhonen

Abstract: Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate state-of-the-art capabilities across diverse cross-lingual and multilingual tasks. Their complex internal mechanisms, however, often lack transparency, posing significant challenges in elucidating their internal processing of multilingualism, cross-lingual transfer dynamics and handling of language-specific features. This paper addresses this critical gap by presenting a survey of current explainability and interpretability methods specifically for MLLMs. To our knowledge, it is the first comprehensive review of its kind. Existing literature is categorised according to the explainability techniques employed, the multilingual tasks addressed, the languages investigated and available resources. The survey further identifies key challenges, distils core findings and outlines promising avenues for future research within this rapidly evolving domain.