# On the limited utility of parallel data for learning shared multilingual representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29026 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29026/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Addition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06681/) (2023)
- [How Contextual are Contextualized Word Representations? Comparing the Geometry of BERT, ELMo, and GPT-2 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00512/) (2019)
- [The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in Large Language Model Representations of True/False Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06824/) (2023)
- [How multilingual is Multilingual BERT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01502/) (2019)
- [OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00838/) (2024)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01696/) (2016)
- [Insights on representational similarity in neural networks with canonical correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05759/) (2018)
- [Emerging Cross-lingual Structure in Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01464/) (2019)
- [CCMatrix: Mining Billions of High-Quality Parallel Sentences on the WEB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04944/) (2019)
- [FineWeb2: One Pipeline to Scale Them All -- Adapting Pre-Training Data Processing to Every Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20920/) (2025)
- [Language Contamination Helps Explain the Cross-lingual Capabilities of English Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08110/) (2022)
- [On the Multilingual Ability of Decoder-based Pre-trained Language Models: Finding and Controlling Language-Specific Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02431/) (2024)
- [Searching for Needles in a Haystack: On the Role of Incidental Bilingualism in PaLM's Translation Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10266/) (2023)
- [A New Massive Multilingual Dataset for High-Performance Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14009/) (2024)
- [nmT5 -- Is parallel data still relevant for pre-training massively multilingual language models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02171/) (2021)
- [Poro 34B and the Blessing of Multilinguality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01856/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Shared multilingual representations are essential for cross-lingual tasks and knowledge transfer across languages. This study looks at the impact of parallel data, i.e. translated sentences, in pretraining as a signal to trigger representations that are aligned across languages. We train reference models with different proportions of parallel data and show that parallel data seem to have only a minimal effect on the cross-lingual alignment. Based on multiple evaluation methods, we find that the effect is limited to potentially accelerating the representation sharing in the early phases of pretraining, and to decreasing the amount of language-specific neurons in the model. Cross-lingual alignment seems to emerge on similar levels even without the explicit signal from parallel data.