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Qwen Language Confusion Gate (arxiv.org)
2 points by CollinZ 348 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A small add-on filter blocks words in the wrong language as text is generated, letting the model teach itself which language each word belongs to. It cut language mixing often tenfold without hurting task performance, unlike retraining or fixes that also block intentional switching.

Abstract · Language Confusion Gate: Language-Aware Decoding Through Model Self-Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) often experience language confusion, which is the unintended mixing of languages during text generation. Current solutions to this problem either necessitate model retraining or cannot differentiate between harmful confusion and acceptable code-switching. This paper introduces the Language Confusion Gate (LCG), a lightweight, plug-in solution that filters tokens during decoding without altering the base LLM. The LCG is trained using norm-adjusted self-distillation to predict appropriate language families and apply masking only when needed. Our method is based on the findings that language confusion is infrequent, correct-language tokens are usually among the top predictions, and output token embedding norms are larger for high-resource languages, which biases sampling. When evaluated across various models, including Qwen3, GPT-OSS, Gemma3, Llama3.1, LCG decreases language confusion significantly, often by an order of magnitude, without negatively impacting task performance. Code is available at https://github.com/collinzrj/language_confusion_gate.

Collin Zhang, Fei Huang, Chenhan Yuan, Junyang Lin
arXiv:2510.17555 · cs.CL · submitted Oct 20, 2025
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