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%.
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.
Translation cascades for reasoning translate the query from another language to English, reason in English, and translate the answer back to the original language. This is a competitive approach to multilingual reasoning, but structurally lossy, since each stage discards information later stages may need, including cues for cultural grounding, register, and disambiguation.
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.
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.
The paper investigates why large reasoning language models struggle to transfer parametric knowledge across different scripts. Through observational data and regression analysis on ECLeKTic and MultiLoKo datasets, the authors find that script mismatch—not language family—is the main predictor of transfer failure when controlling for model capability and question difficulty. By providing key entities in the source language and training models to reason about transliteration ambiguities, they demonstrate a reduction in the cross‑script transfer gap, suggesting that post‑training improvements can enhance cross‑lingual knowledge transfer.
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.
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.
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) follow Occam's Razor when performing inductive and abductive reasoning. It introduces a synthetic framework for generating questions that require both types of reasoning and a new automated metric to evaluate the simplicity and correctness of generated hypotheses. Experiments show that while LLMs can handle simple scenarios, they struggle with complex world models and producing high‑quality, simplest hypotheses, even when using advanced reasoning techniques.
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.
arXiv:2608. 04444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often generate inaccurate answers due to their reliance on static internal knowledge.
arXiv:2607. 22554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often achieve strong accuracy on benchmarks, yet it remains unclear how reliably they apply this knowledge when the same question is phrased in different but equivalent ways.
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.