Multilingual Embedding Probes Fail to Generalize Across Learner Corpora

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arXiv:2604.07095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Do multilingual embedding models encode a language-general representation of proficiency? We investigate this by training linear and non-linear probes on hidden-state activations from seven embedding models (0.3-8B) to predict CEFR proficiency levels from learner texts across nine corpora and seven languages. We compare five probing architectures against a baseline trained on surface-level text features. Under in-distribution evaluation, probes achieve strong performance (Quadratic Weighted Kappa $\approx0.7$), substantially outperforming the surface baseline, with middle layers consistently yielding the best predictions. However, in cross-corpus evaluation performance collapses across all probe types and model sizes. Residual analysis reveals that out-of-distribution probes converge towards predicting uniformly distributed labels, indicating that the learned mappings capture corpus-specific distributional properties (topic, language, task type, rating methodology) rather than an abstract, transferable proficiency dimension. These results suggest that current multilingual embeddings do not straightforwardly encode language-general proficiency, with implications for representation-based approaches to proficiency-adaptive language technology.

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