The Score Is Not the Structure: Brain Alignment and Cross-Lingual Transfer

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.03827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Researchers often support the claim that a model shares structure with the brain, or across languages, by reporting a similarity score. We ask what such a score reads when the shared structure is absent, or when the tool that measures it does not work. We check two settings, and in both the score is not what it appears. First, a probe trained to tell grammatical from ungrammatical sentences in one language transfers worse to more distant language