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EMNLP Findings2025

MMATH: A Multilingual Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning

Wenyang Luo, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jing Sha, Shijin Wang, Ji-Rong Wen

Abstract

The advent of large reasoning models, such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1, has significantly advanced complex reasoning tasks. However, their capabilities in multilingual complex reasoning remain underexplored, with existing efforts largely focused on simpler tasks like MGSM. To address this gap, we introduce MMATH, a benchmark for multilingual complex reasoning spanning 374 high-quality math problems across 10 typologically diverse languages. Using MMATH, we observe that even advanced models like DeepSeek R1 exhibit substantial performance disparities across languages and suffer from a critical off-target issue-generating responses in unintended languages. To address this, we explore strategies including prompting and training, demonstrating that reasoning in English and answering in target languages can simultaneously enhance performance and preserve target-language consistency. Our findings offer new insights and practical strategies for advancing the multilingual reasoning capabilities of large language models. Our code and data could be found at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/MMATH.

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Cited by top-tier papers3

  1. Think Natively: Unlocking Multilingual Reasoning with Consistency-Enhanced Reinforcement LearningXue Zhang, Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Songming Zhang et al.ACL 2026 · 13 citations
  2. LANG: Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Reasoning with Language-Adaptive Hint GuidanceYuchun Fan, Bei Li, Peiguang Li, Yilin Wang et al.ACL 2026 · 1 citation
  3. SPEED-Bench: A Unified and Diverse Benchmark for Speculative DecodingTalor Abramovich, Maor Ashkenazi, Izzy Putterman, Benjamin Chislett et al.ICML 2026

Builds on12

  1. Let's Verify Step by StepHunter Lightman, Vineet Kosaraju, Yuri Burda, Harrison Edwards et al.ICLR 2024 · 3,045 citations
  2. AlphaZero-Like Tree-Search can Guide Large Language Model Decoding and TrainingZiyu Wan, Xidong Feng, Muning Wen, Stephen Marcus McAleer et al.ICML 2024 · 325 citations
  3. 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
  4. Language models are multilingual chain-of-thought reasonersFreda Shi, Mirac Suzgun, Markus Freitag, Xuezhi Wang et al.ICLR 2023 · 52 citations
  5. Linguistic Generalizability of Test-Time Scaling in Mathematical ReasoningGuijin Son, Jiwoo Hong, Hyunwoo Ko, James ThorneACL 2025 · 36 citations

Related papers

  1. mCoT: Multilingual Instruction Tuning for Reasoning Consistency in Language ModelsHuiyuan Lai, Malvina NissimACL 2024 · 5 citations
  2. Large Language Models Struggle with Unreasonability in Math ProblemsJingyuan Ma, Damai Dai, Zihang Yuan, Rui Li et al.AAAI 2026 · 10 citations
  3. RBench: Graduate-level Multi-disciplinary Benchmarks for LLM & MLLM Complex Reasoning EvaluationMeng-Hao Guo, Jiajun Xu, Yi Zhang, Jiaxi Song et al.ICML 2025
  4. C²RBench: A Chinese Complex Reasoning Benchmark for Large Language ModelsJunru Wu, Tianhao Shen, Linxi Su, Deyi XiongACL Findings 2025 · 2 citations
  5. UGMathBench: A Diverse and Dynamic Benchmark for Undergraduate-Level Mathematical Reasoning with Large Language ModelsXin Xu, Jiaxin Zhang, Tianhao Chen, Zitong Chao et al.ICLR 2025
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