arXiv Computation and Language

XHotpotQA: A Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Knowledge Composition in Multi-Hop Question Answering

XHotpotQA is a new benchmark for cross‑lingual knowledge composition in multi‑hop question answering. It presents each instance as an evidence‑dependency graph with explicit language assignments for the question, bridge evidence, answer‑bearing evidence, and distractors, and includes 15,661 training and 7,405 validation examples with sentence‑level support supervision. The dataset reveals significant performance drops when evidence spans language boundaries, providing a diagnostic tool for systems that must integrate evidence across languages.

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)
arXiv AI
Aug 5

DocTrace: Towards Traceable Long Document VQA via Hierarchical Evidence Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 03292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long Document Visual Question Answering (LongDocVQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to locate, integrate, and reason over heterogeneous document elements distributed across multiple pages.

By Le Xiang, Zhicheng Guan, Hong Chen, Xiaocong Lin, Zhenghua Lei, Teng Hu, Bolei He, Long Zeng
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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

L3Cube-IndicQuest v2: A Large-Scale Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Factual Knowledge of Large Language Models Across Indic Languages

arXiv:2608. 15535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present L3Cube-IndicQuest v2, a large-scale gold-standard multilingual question-answering benchmark for evaluating the India-specific factual knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs).

By Rinit Jain, Tirthraj Mahajan, Advait Joshi, Raviraj Joshi
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Large Reasoning Models Struggle to Transfer Parametric Knowledge Across Scripts

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.

By Lucas Bandarkar, Alan Ansell, Trevor Cohn
arXiv AI
3d ago

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