# Gradual Code-Switching as Inference-Time Cross-Lingual Representational Alignment for LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05678 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05678/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Language Models are Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03057/) (2022)
- [Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10588/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10668/) (2021)
- [Global MMLU: Understanding and Addressing Cultural and Linguistic Biases in Multilingual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03304/) (2024)
- [Do LLMs exhibit human-like response biases? A case study in survey design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04076/) (2023)
- [BLEnD: A Benchmark for LLMs on Everyday Knowledge in Diverse Cultures and Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09948/) (2024)
- [Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07004/) (2023)
- [How do Large Language Models Handle Multilingualism?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18815/) (2024)
- [A Paradigm Shift in Machine Translation: Boosting Translation Performance of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11674/) (2023)
- [Do Multilingual Language Models Think Better in English?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01223/) (2023)
- [Do Multilingual LLMs Think In English?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15603/) (2025)
- [Multilingual LLMs are Better Cross-lingual In-context Learners with Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05940/) (2023)
- [BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14857/) (2023)
- [LLMs Are Few-Shot In-Context Low-Resource Language Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16512/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14235/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Code-switching: Linguistic and Social Perspectives for Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01967/) (2023)
- [PolyMath: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning in Multilingual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18428/) (2025)
- [xCoT: Cross-lingual Instruction Tuning for Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07037/) (2024)
- [MedExpQA: Multilingual Benchmarking of Large Language Models for Medical Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05590/) (2024)
- [The Decades Progress on Code-Switching Research in NLP: A Systematic Survey on Trends and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09660/) (2022)
- [MBBQ: A Dataset for Cross-Lingual Comparison of Stereotypes in Generative LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07243/) (2024)
- [Code-Switching Red-Teaming: LLM Evaluation for Safety and Multilingual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15481/) (2024)
- [Improving In-context Learning of Multilingual Generative Language Models with Cross-lingual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08089/) (2023)
- [Code-Switching Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Transfer in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02460/) (2024)
- [Language Mixing in Reasoning Language Models: Patterns, Impact, and Internal Causes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14815/) (2025)
- [Investigating and Scaling up Code-Switching for Multilingual Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01801/) (2025)
- [SwitchLingua: The First Large-Scale Multilingual and Multi-Ethnic Code-Switching Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00087/) (2025)
- [Breaking the Language Barrier: Can Direct Inference Outperform Pre-Translation in Multilingual LLM Applications?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04792/) (2024)
- [The Impact of Language Mixing on Bilingual LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15849/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Code Mixologist : A Practitioner's Guide to Building Code-Mixed LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11181/) (2026)
- [Soft Token Alignment for Cross-Lingual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26466/) (2026)
- [Feeding BabyLMs Macaroni: Code-Switching Curricula Cause Cross-Lingual Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30535/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While large language models (LLMs) have achieved notable progress in multilingual settings, their performance remains uneven across languages as LLMs often rely on English-centric latent representations. In this work, we introduce code-switching in-context learning (CSICL), an inference-time mechanism for cross-lingual representational alignment. Rather than relying on an abrupt translation pivot, CSICL explicitly scaffolds the reasoning trajectory by gradually transitioning from a target language to English, aligning non-English inputs with an English-centric reasoning space. Across 4 LLMs, 6 datasets, and 10 languages, CSICL consistently outperforms cross-lingual in-context learning baselines, yielding average gains of 6.0pp and 4.8pp in target and unseen languages, respectively. The improvements generalize across language families and are even more pronounced in low-resource settings, with gains of 14.7pp in target and 5.3pp in unseen languages. These findings establish code-switching as a robust and effective approach for reducing cross-lingual misalignment during inference, moving LLMs towards more equitable and effective multilingual systems.