LaCoMSA: Language-Consistency Multilingual Self-Alignment with Latent Representation Rewarding

Khanh-Tung Tran, Barry O'Sullivan, Hoang D. Nguyen

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance yet remain inconsistent across languages, often defaulting to high-resource outputs such as English. Existing multilingual alignment methods mitigate these issues through preference optimization but rely on external supervision, such as translation systems or English-biased signal. We propose Multilingual Self-Alignment (MSA), a targeted preference optimization framework that leverages an LLM’s own latent representations as intrinsic supervision signals, rewarding lower-resource language outputs based on their alignment with high-resource (English) counterparts in the "semantic hub". We further introduce Language-Consistency MSA (LaCoMSA), which augments MSA with a final-layer language-consistency factor to prevent off-target generation. Integrated with Direct Preference Optimization, LaCoMSA improves a Llama 3 8B-based model multilingual win rates by up to 6.8% absolute (55.0% relatively) on X-AlpacaEval and achieves consistent gains across benchmarks and models. Our findings demonstrate that LaCoMSA can serve as an effective and scalable mechanism, opening a new venue toward multilingual self-alignment.

External IDs:dblp:conf/eacl/TranON26