Towards Better Understanding of Program-of-Thought Reasoning in Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Environments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Payoungkhamdee, Patomporn, Tuchinda, Pume, Baek, Jinheon, Cahyawijaya, Samuel, Udomcharoenchaikit, Can, Manakul, Potsawee, Limkonchotiwat, Peerat, Chuangsuwanich, Ekapol, Nutanong, Sarana
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Payoungkhamdee, Patomporn
Tuchinda, Pume
Baek, Jinheon
Cahyawijaya, Samuel
Udomcharoenchaikit, Can
Manakul, Potsawee
Limkonchotiwat, Peerat
Chuangsuwanich, Ekapol
Nutanong, Sarana
author_facet Payoungkhamdee, Patomporn
Tuchinda, Pume
Baek, Jinheon
Cahyawijaya, Samuel
Udomcharoenchaikit, Can
Manakul, Potsawee
Limkonchotiwat, Peerat
Chuangsuwanich, Ekapol
Nutanong, Sarana
contents Multi-step reasoning is essential for large language models (LLMs), yet multilingual performance remains challenging. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning, it struggles with non-English languages due to the entanglement of reasoning and execution. Program-of-Thought (PoT) prompting separates reasoning from execution, offering a promising alternative but shifting the challenge to generating programs from non-English questions. We propose a framework to evaluate PoT by separating multilingual reasoning from code execution to examine (i) the impact of fine-tuning on question-reasoning alignment and (ii) how reasoning quality affects answer correctness. Our findings demonstrate that PoT fine-tuning substantially enhances multilingual reasoning, outperforming CoT fine-tuned models. We further demonstrate a strong correlation between reasoning quality (measured through code quality) and answer accuracy, highlighting its potential as a test-time performance improvement heuristic.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17956
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Better Understanding of Program-of-Thought Reasoning in Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Environments
Payoungkhamdee, Patomporn
Tuchinda, Pume
Baek, Jinheon
Cahyawijaya, Samuel
Udomcharoenchaikit, Can
Manakul, Potsawee
Limkonchotiwat, Peerat
Chuangsuwanich, Ekapol
Nutanong, Sarana
Computation and Language
Multi-step reasoning is essential for large language models (LLMs), yet multilingual performance remains challenging. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning, it struggles with non-English languages due to the entanglement of reasoning and execution. Program-of-Thought (PoT) prompting separates reasoning from execution, offering a promising alternative but shifting the challenge to generating programs from non-English questions. We propose a framework to evaluate PoT by separating multilingual reasoning from code execution to examine (i) the impact of fine-tuning on question-reasoning alignment and (ii) how reasoning quality affects answer correctness. Our findings demonstrate that PoT fine-tuning substantially enhances multilingual reasoning, outperforming CoT fine-tuned models. We further demonstrate a strong correlation between reasoning quality (measured through code quality) and answer accuracy, highlighting its potential as a test-time performance improvement heuristic.
title Towards Better Understanding of Program-of-Thought Reasoning in Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Environments
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17956