arXiv Computation and Language

Investigating the Role of Reasoning-Language Alignment in Monolingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The study explores how the language used for reasoning affects retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) in a monolingual German setting. Using a German RAG question‑answering testbed based on the tabletop game The Dark Eye, the authors show that aligning the reasoning language with the query and retrieved documents improves performance, with German reasoning outperforming French reasoning. However, German reasoning still does not surpass the model’s native English reasoning, indicating that native multilingual reasoning is necessary for optimal results.

arXiv Computation and Language

Aug 27

Rethinking the Multilingual Reasoning Gap with Layer Swap

The study investigates the performance gap between native-language reasoning and English-pivoted reasoning in large language models. By creating extensive multilingual reasoning datasets and fine‑tuning specialists on Qwen/Qwen3-8B-Base, the authors find that the native reasoning gap is much smaller (1.9–3.5%) than previously reported. They analyze weight‑space changes, discover a language‑agnostic reasoning core in the middle layers, and propose a Layer Swap technique that transfers these mid‑layer updates from an English specialist to native specialists, effectively closing most of the gap while maintaining native chain‑of‑thought output.

By Maxence Lasbordes, Am\'elie Chatelain, Djam\'e Seddah

llms fine-tuning

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 10

Building Multilingual Bridges: Data Mixing as the Pillar of Generalization for In-Language Reasoning

arXiv:2609.10445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning language models have made substantial advances on a variety of complex tasks, yet their capabilities remain overwhelmingly English-centric: m...

By Mehrnaz Mofakhami, Ananya Sahu, Alejandro R. Salamanca, Daniel D'souza, Alexandre Berard, Thomas Euyang, Marzieh Fadaee, Julia Kreutzer

llms fine-tuning benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 12

From Reasoning Depth to Reasoning Breadth: Evaluating Multi-Point Associative Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 10444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress on reasoning tasks that require increasingly long and complex inferential chains.

By Si'an Xie (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications), Jiaxun Liu (Peking University), Biao Yang (Kuaishou Technology), Wei Yuan (Kuaishou Technology), Fan Yang (Kuaishou Technology), Tingting Gao (Kuaishou Technology), Ming Wu (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications)

llms rag agents benchmarks

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 22

What Makes Good Multilingual Reasoning? Disentangling Traces with Measurable Features

arXiv:2604.04720v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) still exhibit large performance gaps between English and other languages, yet much current work assumes these gaps ca...

By Dayeon Ki, Kevin Duh, Marine Carpuat

benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Sep 1

Do Language Models Reason Across Languages?

The paper investigates whether language models can reason across languages by introducing a two‑hop question answering task that requires inference over two multilingual documents. Results show that models are more sensitive to language variation in answer‑span documents than in bridging documents, and that up to 33% of multilingual cases involve correct final answers despite failing to infer bridging information in the first step. The study also reveals an 18% composition failure rate and proposes a three‑stage SUBQ prompting method that improves accuracy from 10.1% to 66.5%.

By Yan Meng, Wafaa Mohammed, Christof Monz

llms nlp

arXiv AI

Sep 30

What Does Post-Training Change in Multilingual Reasoning?

arXiv:2609.37104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source reasoning models provide unequal access to reasoning capability across languages. When a model can solve a problem but cannot deliver a c...

By Hongyang Li, Xiao Li, Caesar Wu, Gr\'egoire Danoy, Pascal Bouvry

reinforcement-learning fine-tuning

arXiv AI

Jun 16

AdaMame: A Training Recipe for Adaptive Multilingual Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 15080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) show strong performance in English, they often fail to reason in the language of the query, a phenomenon known as language collapse.

By Dayeon Ki, Kevin Duh, Marine Carpuat

reinforcement-learning fine-tuning benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jul 8

Estimating Uncertainty from Reasoning: A Large-Scale Study of Multi- and Crosslingual MCQA Performance in LLMs

arXiv:2607. 06327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty estimation (UE) enables LLM-powered systems to recognize when to abstain, yet existing research has predominantly focused on English.

By Andrea Alfarano, Andrea Bacciu, Saab Mansour, Amin Mantrach, Marcello Federico

llms rag

arXiv AI

Jun 2

Learning When to Translate for Multilingual Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 02465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning language models (RLMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, but still exhibit substantial multilingual reasoning gaps, largely due to language-understanding failures in non-English inputs.

By Deokhyung Kang, Hyounghun Kim, Gary Geunbae Lee

llms reinforcement-learning benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 14

Better Decomposition, Free Aggregation: A Synthesizer-Folding Framework for Multilingual Multi-Hop Question Answering

arXiv:2608. 13160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual retrieval-augmented generation (mRAG) equips large language models with access to globally distributed external knowledge for complex multilingual question answering.

By Yilin Wang, Yuchun Fan, Weidong Bao, Zili Wei, Shi Feng, Tong Xiao, Zhengtao Yu, Jingbo Zhu

llms rag nlp safety

Hugging Face Trending Papers

Jun 1

Learning When to Translate for Multilingual Reasoning

Reasoning language models (RLMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, but still exhibit substantial multilingual reasoning gaps, largely due to language-understanding failures in non-English inputs. English translation can mitigate these failures by expressing non-English inputs in a form that RLMs can more reliably interpret, yet translating every input is unnecessary when the model can reason reliably from the original query.

llms reinforcement-learning benchmarks

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 15

Identifying Crucial Attention Heads for Multilingual Language Models: Retrieval and Retrieval-Transition Heads

arXiv:2602.22453v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval heads, a subset of attention heads in Transformers, were studied in English, showing its crucial role in retrieving information from the...

By Shaswat Patel, Vishvesh Trivedi, Yue Han, Yihuai Hong, Eunsol Choi

llms benchmarks

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