CRANE: Causal Relevance Analysis of Language-Specific Neurons in Multilingual Large Language Models

ArXi:2601.04664v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Multilingual large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across languages, yet how language capabilities are organized at the neuron level remains poorly understood. Prior work has identified language-related neurons mainly through activation-based heuristics, which conflate language preference with functional importance. We propose CRANE, a relevance-based analysis framework that redefines language specificity in terms of functional necessity, identifying language-specific neurons through targeted neuron-level interventions.