CLApr 16

Large Reasoning Models Are (Not Yet) Multilingual Latent Reasoners

arXiv:2601.0299643.59 citationsh-index: 16
Predicted impact top 22% in CL · last 90 daysOriginality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

For researchers studying reasoning in multilingual AI systems, this work reveals that LRMs' latent reasoning is English-centered and uneven across languages, highlighting a limitation for non-English users.

The paper investigates multilingual latent reasoning in large reasoning models (LRMs) across 11 languages, finding evidence of latent reasoning that is strong in resource-rich languages but weaker in low-resource ones, and less observable on harder benchmarks. Representational analyses reveal that internal prediction evolution is consistent across languages and aligns with English, suggesting an English-centered latent reasoning pathway.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at the correct answer before completing these textual reasoning steps, indicating the presence of latent reasoning -- internal, non-verbal computation encoded in hidden states. While this phenomenon has been explored in English, its multilingual behavior remains largely unknown. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation of multilingual latent reasoning in LRMs across 11 languages. Using a truncation-based strategy, we examine how the correct answer emerges as the model is given only partial reasoning traces, allowing us to measure stepwise latent prediction formation. Our results reveal clear evidence of multilingual latent reasoning, though unevenly: strong in resource-rich languages, weaker in low-resource ones, and broadly less observable on harder benchmarks. To understand whether these differences reflect distinct internal mechanisms, we further perform representational analyses. Despite surface-level disparities, we find that the internal evolution of predictions is highly consistent across languages and broadly aligns with English -- a pattern suggesting an English-centered latent reasoning pathway.

Foundations

The foundational work for this paper's niche, ranked by how specifically the neighbourhood builds on it — not by global fame.

Your Notes