Understand, Solve and Translate: Bridging the Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning Gap

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Ko, Hyunwoo, Son, Guijin, Choi, Dasol
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866929692998631424
author Ko, Hyunwoo
Son, Guijin
Choi, Dasol
author_facet Ko, Hyunwoo
Son, Guijin
Choi, Dasol
contents Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on complex reasoning tasks. However, despite their strong reasoning capabilities in high-resource languages (e.g., English and Chinese), a significant performance gap persists in other languages. To investigate this gap in Korean, we introduce HRM8K, a benchmark comprising 8,011 English-Korean parallel bilingual math problems. Through systematic analysis of model behaviors, we identify a key finding: these performance disparities stem primarily from difficulties in comprehending non-English inputs, rather than limitations in reasoning capabilities. Based on these findings, we propose UST (Understand, Solve, and Translate), a method that strategically uses English as an anchor for reasoning and solution generation. By fine-tuning the model on 130k synthetically generated data points, UST achieves a 10.91% improvement on the HRM8K benchmark and reduces the multilingual performance gap from 11.6% to 0.7%. Additionally, we show that improvements from UST generalize effectively to different Korean domains, demonstrating that capabilities acquired from machine-verifiable content can be generalized to other areas. We publicly release the benchmark, training dataset, and models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_02448
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understand, Solve and Translate: Bridging the Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning Gap
Ko, Hyunwoo
Son, Guijin
Choi, Dasol
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on complex reasoning tasks. However, despite their strong reasoning capabilities in high-resource languages (e.g., English and Chinese), a significant performance gap persists in other languages. To investigate this gap in Korean, we introduce HRM8K, a benchmark comprising 8,011 English-Korean parallel bilingual math problems. Through systematic analysis of model behaviors, we identify a key finding: these performance disparities stem primarily from difficulties in comprehending non-English inputs, rather than limitations in reasoning capabilities. Based on these findings, we propose UST (Understand, Solve, and Translate), a method that strategically uses English as an anchor for reasoning and solution generation. By fine-tuning the model on 130k synthetically generated data points, UST achieves a 10.91% improvement on the HRM8K benchmark and reduces the multilingual performance gap from 11.6% to 0.7%. Additionally, we show that improvements from UST generalize effectively to different Korean domains, demonstrating that capabilities acquired from machine-verifiable content can be generalized to other areas. We publicly release the benchmark, training dataset, and models.
title Understand, Solve and Translate: Bridging the Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning Gap
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02448