arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

When Does Reasoning Help in Machine Translation? A Hierarchical Analysis of LRM Reasoning Traces

The paper investigates when intermediate reasoning traces benefit machine translation by examining models, languages, domains, and datasets. It finds that the optimal reasoning language depends on the model, reasoning length has a non‑monotonic effect on quality, and traces display recurring functional patterns. Using Hierarchical Meta‑Summarization, the authors uncover a shared structure of understanding/planning, translating/drafting, and refining/verifying, while also noting domain‑specific variations, suggesting that reasoning should be tailored rather than uniformly applied.

By Yuxiang Liu, Jiaming Luo, Eleftheria Briakou, Colin Cherry
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Reasoning over Grammar: Can Synthetic Linguistic Reasoning Traces Enhance Low-Resource Machine Translation?

The paper explores whether structured linguistic reasoning traces can improve low‑resource machine translation by guiding large language models (LLMs). It proposes a pipeline that automatically generates step‑by‑step reasoning traces from Universal Dependencies treebanks, dictionaries, and grammar‑rule banks, and evaluates these traces in in‑context learning, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement fine‑tuning on Xibe and Chintang. The results show that providing reliable reasoning traces at inference time significantly boosts translation quality, whereas using them as training data yields smaller, less consistent gains, indicating that LLMs can benefit from grammatical guidance but struggle to generate accurate analyses themselves.

By Renhao Pei, Yihong Liu, Sampo Pyysalo, Hinrich Sch\"utze, Shaoxiong Ji
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

TRACES: Tagging Reasoning Steps for Adaptive Cost-Efficient Early-Stopping

TRACES (Tagging Reasoning Steps for Adaptive Cost‑Efficient Early‑Stopping) is a lightweight framework that tags reasoning steps of large‑language models in real time, enabling adaptive, cost‑efficient early stopping during inference. By monitoring the types of steps generated, the method identifies when models shift their reasoning after arriving at a correct answer, allowing for interpretable stopping criteria. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks (MATH500, GSM8K, AIME) and knowledge benchmarks (MMLU, GPQA) show token reductions of 20–50% while preserving accuracy, with more conservative thresholds needed for harder tasks such as BeyondAIME and IMO AnswerBench.

By Yannis Belkhiter, Seshu Tirupathi, Giulio Zizzo, John D. Kelleher