arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 8

Which Language Should a Skeleton Speak? Language Choices in Multilingual Reasoning

The paper introduces the Language-Aware Skeleton Exploration Framework (LASEF) to investigate how the language of skeleton prompts affects multilingual mathematical reasoning in large language models. Experiments across various math benchmarks, model sizes, and languages show that English skeletons provide a modest advantage on average, especially for smaller models and low-resource languages, but this advantage is not universal and often not statistically significant after correction. The study identifies three distinct patterns of skeleton-language effects—directionally consistent, evaluation- and benchmark-dependent, and asymmetric negative—highlighting that skeleton language is a context-dependent design choice that requires comprehensive exploration.

By HyeonSeok Lim, SeungWoo Song, Inho Won, Hoyun Song, Jihyo Kim, KyungTae Lim
arXiv AI
Jul 8

PluraMath: Extending Mathematical Reasoning Evaluation Beyond High-Resource Languages

arXiv:2607. 05992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mathematical reasoning has become a central task for evaluating and tuning reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing benchmarks remain heavily biased toward high-resource languages, with English and Chinese dominating both pre-training corpora and evaluation suites.

By Daryna Dementieva, Nikolay Babakov, Kathy H\"ammerl, Ilseyar Alimova, Jind\v{r}ich Libovick\'y, Shu Okabe, Miras Baisbay, Lukas Edman, Abrorkhon Inomkhujaev, Antonia Karamolegkou, Mateusz Lango, Volkan \"Ozer, Nikola Selic, Subhankar Swain, Tsedeniya Kinfe Temesgen, Galit Bary Weisberg, Alexander Fraser
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 Computation and Language
Oct 5

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.

By Oliver Hauck, Mario Sanz-Guerrero, Katharina von der Wense
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 23

How Well Does Mathematical Reasoning Transfer Across Languages in English-Centric LLMs?

The paper investigates how mathematical reasoning improvements from Reinforcement Post-Training (RPT) in English-centric large language models (LLMs) transfer to other languages. Experiments show that transfer varies greatly depending on the initial model, target language, and training approach, and that stronger English initialization does not guarantee better transfer efficiency. Adding a single parallel language to the training data yields the largest boost, with additional languages providing smaller but consistent gains.

By Wen Yang, Junhong Wu, Chong Li, Chengqing Zong, Jiajun Zhang