# Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer using Prefix-Based Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24619 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24619/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11856/) (2019)
- [The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16884/) (2023)
- [Prompt-Tuning Can Be Much Better Than Fine-Tuning on Cross-lingual Understanding With Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12360/) (2022)
- [PARA: Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning with Prompt Aware Representation Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01033/) (2025)
- [Soft Prompt Tuning for Cross-Lingual Transfer: When Less is More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03782/) (2024)
- [Efficiently Aligned Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Conversational Tasks using Prompt-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01295/) (2023)
- [Soft Language Prompts for Language Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02317/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Small Language Models for Cross-Lingual Generalized Zero-Shot Classification with Soft Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19469/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the release of new large language models (LLMs) like Llama and Mistral, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer has become increasingly feasible due to their multilingual pretraining and strong generalization capabilities. However, adapting these decoder-only LLMs to new tasks across languages remains challenging. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PeFT) techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely used, prefix-based techniques such as soft prompt tuning, prefix tuning, and Llama Adapter are less explored, especially for zero-shot transfer in decoder-only models. We present a comprehensive study of three prefix-based methods for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer from English to 35+ high- and low-resource languages. Our analysis further explores transfer across linguistic families and scripts, as well as the impact of scaling model sizes from 1B to 24B. With Llama 3.1 8B, prefix methods outperform LoRA-baselines by up to 6% on the Belebele benchmark. Similar improvements were observed with Mistral v0.3 7B as well. Despite using only 1.23M learning parameters with prefix tuning, we achieve consistent improvements across diverse benchmarks. These findings highlight the potential of prefix-based techniques as an effective and scalable alternative to LoRA, particularly in low-resource multilingual settings.