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EMNLP Findings2025

A Survey of Multilingual Reasoning in Language Models

Akash Ghosh, Debayan Datta, Sriparna Saha, Chirag Agarwal

Abstract

While reasoning and multilingual capabilities in Language Models (LMs) have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, their integration into a unified paradigm-multilingual reasoning-is at a nascent stage. Multilingual reasoning requires language models to handle logical reasoning across languages while addressing misalignment, biases, and challenges in low-resource settings. This survey provides the first in-depth review of multilingual reasoning in LMs. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of existing methods that leverage LMs for multilingual reasoning, specifically outlining the challenges, motivations, and foundational aspects of applying language models to reason across diverse languages. We provide an overview of the standard data resources used for training multilingual reasoning in LMs and the evaluation benchmarks employed to assess their multilingual capabilities. Next, we analyze various state-of-the-art methods and their performance on these benchmarks. Finally, we explore future research opportunities to improve multilingual reasoning in LMs, focusing on enhancing their ability to handle diverse languages and complex reasoning tasks. Rapid growth of evolving developments in this field can be actively tracked on our project page: https://github.com/AkashGhosh/Survey -of-Multilingual-Reasoning-in-Langu age-Models

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Cited by top-tier papers3

  1. When Less Language is More: Language-Reasoning Disentanglement Makes LLMs Better Multilingual ReasonersWeixiang Zhao, Jiahe Guo, Yang Deng, Tongtong Wu et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 20 citations
  2. Toward Robust Multilingual Adaptation of LLMs for Low-Resource LanguagesHaolin Li, Haipeng Zhang, Mang Li, Yaohua Wang et al.ICML 2026
  3. Less Languages, Less Tokens: An Efficient Unified Logic Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning FrameworkChenyuan Zhang, Qiguang Chen, Xie Chen, Zhuotao Tian et al.ACL 2026

Builds on24

  1. Measuring Massive Multitask Language UnderstandingDan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou et al.ICLR 2021 · 7,905 citations
  2. Transfer Q-star : Principled Decoding for LLM AlignmentSouradip Chakraborty, Soumya Suvra Ghosal, Ming Yin, Dinesh Manocha et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 60 citations
  3. Reuse Your Rewards: Reward Model Transfer for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual AlignmentZhaofeng Wu, Ananth Balashankar, Yoon Kim, Jacob Eisenstein et al.EMNLP 2024 · 29 citations
  4. CRUXEVAL-X: A Benchmark for Multilingual Code Reasoning, Understanding and ExecutionRuiyang Xu, Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu, Ming Wen et al.ACL 2025 · 26 citations
  5. mCSQA: Multilingual Commonsense Reasoning Dataset with Unified Creation Strategy by Language Models and HumansYusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro WatanabeACL Findings 2024 · 20 citations

Related papers

  1. MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model EvaluationWeihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng et al.EMNLP 2025 · 4 citations
  2. Demystifying Multilingual Reasoning in Process Reward ModelingWeixuan Wang, Minghao Wu, Barry Haddow, Alexandra BirchEMNLP Findings 2025
  3. MindMerger: Efficiently Boosting LLM Reasoning in non-English LanguagesZixian Huang, Wenhao Zhu, Gong Cheng, Lei Li et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 31 citations
  4. Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought PromptingHaoyang Huang, Tianyi Tang, Dongdong Zhang, Xin Zhao et al.EMNLP Findings 2023 · 76 citations
  5. Unlocking Multilingual Reasoning Capability of LLMs and LVLMs through Representation EngineeringQiming Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Yixuan Ma, Ruihan Chen et al.ACL 2026 · 4 citations
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