LLMs Are Globally Multilingual Yet Locally Monolingual: Exploring Knowledge Transfer via Language and Thought Theory

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) open up new possibilities for leveraging information across languages, but their factual knowledge recall remains inconsistent depending on the input language. While previous studies have attempted to address this issue through English-based prompting and evaluation, we explore non-English to English transfer via Language and Thought Theory. This perspective allows us to examine language-thought binding in LLMs and uncover why factual knowledge often fails to transfer effectively. We propose the Language-to-Thought (L2T) prompting strategy, which analyzes the relationship between input language, internal cognitive processes, and knowledge. Experimental results challenge the assumption that English-based approaches consistently outperform other languages and offer a novel insight that aligning the model's internal thought with the knowledge required for the task is critical for successful cross-lingual transfer. Furthermore, we show that applying L2T during training can alleviate LLMs' reliance on the input language and facilitate cross-linguistic knowledge integration without translation-based learning. Code and datasets will be available.

Exploring the Impact of Occupational Personas on Domain-Specific QA

Recent studies on personas have improved the way Large Language Models (LLMs) interact with users. However, the effect of personas on domain-specific question-answering (QA) tasks remains a subject of debate. This study analyzes whether personas enhance specialized QA performance by introducing two types of persona: Profession-Based Personas (PBPs) (e.g., scientist), which directly relate to domain expertise, and Occupational Personality-Based Personas (OPBPs) (e.g., scientific person), which reflect cognitive tendencies rather than explicit expertise. Through empirical evaluations across multiple scientific domains, we demonstrate that while PBPs can slightly improve accuracy, OPBPs often degrade performance, even when semantically related to the task. Our findings suggest that persona relevance alone does not guarantee effective knowledge utilization and that they may impose cognitive constraints that hinder optimal knowledge application. Future research can explore how nuanced distinctions in persona representations guide LLMs, potentially contributing to reasoning and knowledge retrieval that more closely mirror human social conceptualization.

Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Knowledge Graph Approach

Large language models (LLMs) typically improve performance by either retrieving semantically similar information, or enhancing reasoning abilities through structured prompts like chain-of-thought. While both strategies are considered crucial, it remains unclear which has a greater impact on model performance or whether a combination of both is necessary. This paper answers this question by proposing a knowledge graph (KG)-based random-walk reasoning approach that leverages causal relationships. We conduct experiments on the commonsense question answering task that is based on a KG. The KG inherently provides both relevant information, such as related entity keywords, and a reasoning structure through the connections between nodes. Experimental results show that the proposed KG-based random-walk reasoning method improves the reasoning ability and performance of LLMs. Interestingly, incorporating three seemingly irrelevant sentences into the query using KG-based random-walk reasoning enhances LLM performance, contrary to conventional wisdom. These findings suggest that integrating causal structures into prompts can significantly improve reasoning capabilities, providing new insights into the role of causality in optimizing LLM performance.