Is continuous CoT better suited for multi-lingual reasoning?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bashir, Ali Hamza, Shomali, Behzad, Frey, Markus, Ali, Mehdi, Sifa, Rafet, Berghaus, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Bashir, Ali Hamza
Shomali, Behzad
Frey, Markus
Ali, Mehdi
Sifa, Rafet
Berghaus, David
author_facet Bashir, Ali Hamza
Shomali, Behzad
Frey, Markus
Ali, Mehdi
Sifa, Rafet
Berghaus, David
contents We investigate whether performing reasoning in a continuous latent space leads to more robust multilingual capabilities. We compare Continuous Chain-of-Thought (using the CODI framework) against standard supervised fine-tuning across five typologically diverse languages: English, Chinese, German, French, and Urdu. Our experiments on GSM8k and CommonsenseQA demonstrate that continuous reasoning significantly outperforms explicit reasoning on low-resource languages, particularly in zero-shot settings where the target language was not seen during training. Additionally, this approach achieves extreme efficiency, compressing reasoning traces by approximately $29\times$ to $50\times$. These findings indicate that continuous latent representations naturally exhibit greater language invariance, offering a scalable solution for cross-lingual reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_08177
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is continuous CoT better suited for multi-lingual reasoning?
Bashir, Ali Hamza
Shomali, Behzad
Frey, Markus
Ali, Mehdi
Sifa, Rafet
Berghaus, David
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
We investigate whether performing reasoning in a continuous latent space leads to more robust multilingual capabilities. We compare Continuous Chain-of-Thought (using the CODI framework) against standard supervised fine-tuning across five typologically diverse languages: English, Chinese, German, French, and Urdu. Our experiments on GSM8k and CommonsenseQA demonstrate that continuous reasoning significantly outperforms explicit reasoning on low-resource languages, particularly in zero-shot settings where the target language was not seen during training. Additionally, this approach achieves extreme efficiency, compressing reasoning traces by approximately $29\times$ to $50\times$. These findings indicate that continuous latent representations naturally exhibit greater language invariance, offering a scalable solution for cross-lingual reasoning.
title Is continuous CoT better suited for multi-lingual reasoning?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08177