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Autores principales: Qi, Jirui, Chen, Shan, Xiong, Zidi, Fernández, Raquel, Bitterman, Danielle S., Bisazza, Arianna
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22888
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author Qi, Jirui
Chen, Shan
Xiong, Zidi
Fernández, Raquel
Bitterman, Danielle S.
Bisazza, Arianna
author_facet Qi, Jirui
Chen, Shan
Xiong, Zidi
Fernández, Raquel
Bitterman, Danielle S.
Bisazza, Arianna
contents Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) with thinking traces have shown strong performance on English reasoning tasks. However, their ability to think in other languages is less studied. This capability is as important as answer accuracy for real world applications because users may find the reasoning trace useful for oversight only when it is expressed in their own language. We comprehensively evaluate two leading families of LRMs on our XReasoning benchmark and find that even the most advanced models often revert to English or produce fragmented reasoning in other languages, revealing a substantial gap in multilingual reasoning. Prompt based interventions that force models to reason in the users language improve readability and oversight but reduce answer accuracy, exposing an important trade off. We further show that targeted post training on just 100 examples mitigates this mismatch, though some accuracy loss remains. Our results highlight the limited multilingual reasoning capabilities of current LRMs and outline directions for future work. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Betswish/mCoT-XReasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22888
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Models Reason in Your Language: Controlling Thinking Language Comes at the Cost of Accuracy
Qi, Jirui
Chen, Shan
Xiong, Zidi
Fernández, Raquel
Bitterman, Danielle S.
Bisazza, Arianna
Computation and Language
Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) with thinking traces have shown strong performance on English reasoning tasks. However, their ability to think in other languages is less studied. This capability is as important as answer accuracy for real world applications because users may find the reasoning trace useful for oversight only when it is expressed in their own language. We comprehensively evaluate two leading families of LRMs on our XReasoning benchmark and find that even the most advanced models often revert to English or produce fragmented reasoning in other languages, revealing a substantial gap in multilingual reasoning. Prompt based interventions that force models to reason in the users language improve readability and oversight but reduce answer accuracy, exposing an important trade off. We further show that targeted post training on just 100 examples mitigates this mismatch, though some accuracy loss remains. Our results highlight the limited multilingual reasoning capabilities of current LRMs and outline directions for future work. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Betswish/mCoT-XReasoning.
title When Models Reason in Your Language: Controlling Thinking Language Comes at the Cost of Accuracy
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22888