Calibration Language Shapes Block-Influence Pruning in Multilingual Language Models

Vedant Pandhare, Piyush Dhoka

Block Influence (BI) ranks Transformer blocks for depth pruning from their input-output cosine change, but the ranking depends on the calibration distribution. We study whether English calibration transfers to Indian languages in Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, Llama-3.2-1B, and Gemma-2-2B. English, Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil use disjoint Wikipedia articles for calibration and evaluation; every selector receives the same 150-chunk budget, and Tamil is excluded from multilingual aggregation to test cross-script transfer. Across all three models, late-block BI is 20.7-55.5% higher for the three Indian languages than for English, and every predeclared late-minus-middle contrast has a 95% bootstrap interval above zero. This mismatch changes the low-BI blocks selected for removal despite high global rank correlations. Averaging BI over equal English, Hindi, and Marathi budgets mitigates the resulting perplexity damage for Qwen at six removed blocks and for Gemma at all tested depths, including held-out Tamil. The mitigation is not universal: on Llama, balancing improves Hindi and Marathi at two removed blocks but severely harms Tamil, while larger pruning budgets select the same blocks and…