mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting

arXiv 2305.07004 ↗First posted 11 May 2023cs.CLcited by 163

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive multilingual capability, but their performance varies substantially across different languages. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective method, called cross-lingual-thought prompting (XLT), to systematically improve the multilingual capability of LLMs. Specifically, XLT is a generic template prompt that stimulates cross-lingual and logical reasoning skills to enhance task performance across languages. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on 7 typical benchmarks related to reasoning, understanding, and generation tasks, covering both high-resource and low-resource languages. Experimental results show that XLT not only remarkably enhances the performance of various multilingual tasks but also significantly reduces the gap between the average performance and the best performance of each task in different languages. Notably, XLT brings over 10 points of average improvement in arithmetic reasoning and open-domain question-answering tasks.

Key facts. Cited by 163 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 40 of its 50 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 May 2023.

Builds on

40 of 50 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity8 Feb

Other references · 39

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  3. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  4. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
  5. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  6. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,768
  7. 2020Scaling Laws for Neural Language Modelscited by 6,411
  8. 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,304
  9. 2019Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scalecited by 3,907
  10. 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,747
  11. 2022OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Modelscited by 3,464
  12. 2023A Survey of Large Language Modelscited by 2,537
27 more
  1. 2022Emergent Abilities of Large Language Modelscited by 2,483
  2. 2022BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 1,968
  3. 2018A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scorescited by 1,790
  4. 2021Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalizationcited by 1,462
  5. 2021Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Modelscited by 1,371
  6. 2022No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translationcited by 1,290
  7. 2020Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translationcited by 1,028
  8. 2018XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representationscited by 913
  9. 2022GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Modelcited by 837
  10. 2022Language Models are Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasonerscited by 518
  11. 2021XL-Sum: Large-Scale Multilingual Abstractive Summarization for 44 Languagescited by 346
  12. 2023How Good Are GPT Models at Machine Translation? A Comprehensive Evaluationcited by 344
  13. 2020XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoningcited by 330
  14. 2023MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AIcited by 291
  15. 2021Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Language Modelscited by 278
  16. 2019PAWS-X: A Cross-lingual Adversarial Dataset for Paraphrase Identificationcited by 262
  17. 2020InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Trainingcited by 237
  18. 2023ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learningcited by 203
  19. 2023Is ChatGPT A Good Translator? Yes With GPT-4 As The Enginecited by 172
  20. 2023Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysiscited by 156
  21. 2020MKQA: A Linguistically Diverse Benchmark for Multilingual Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 151
  22. 2022Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performancecited by 144
  23. 2020ERNIE-M: Enhanced Multilingual Representation by Aligning Cross-lingual Semantics with Monolingual Corporacited by 63
  24. 2021DeltaLM: Encoder-Decoder Pre-training for Language Generation and Translation by Augmenting Pretrained Multilingual Encoderscited by 50
  25. 2023Investigating the Effectiveness of Task-Agnostic Prefix Prompt for Instruction Followingcited by 33
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  27. 2021Towards Making the Most of Multilingual Pretraining for Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translationcited by 8

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 22; 2024: 65; 2025: 60; 2026: 16.

163 papers.

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  1. 2024Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 292
  2. 2024Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformerscited by 275
  3. 2024Leak, Cheat, Repeat: Data Contamination and Evaluation Malpractices in Closed-Source LLMscited by 224
  4. 2023Do All Languages Cost the Same? Tokenization in the Era of Commercial Language Modelscited by 186
  5. 2024A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systemscited by 170
  6. 2024How do Large Language Models Handle Multilingualism?cited by 148
  7. 2024Large Language Models Meet NLP: A Surveycited by 102
  8. 2023Cross-lingual Prompting: Improving Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning across Languagescited by 96
  9. 2023SeaEval for Multilingual Foundation Models: From Cross-Lingual Alignment to Cultural Reasoningcited by 94
  10. 2024LLaMA Beyond English: An Empirical Study on Language Capability Transfercited by 94
  11. 2023Do Multilingual Language Models Think Better in English?cited by 87
  12. 2025Do Multilingual LLMs Think In English?cited by 75
38 more
  1. 2023Extrapolating Large Language Models to Non-English by Aligning Languagescited by 69
  2. 2023BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfercited by 68
  3. 2024MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual Alignment-as-Preference Optimizationcited by 68
  4. 2024Unlocking the Capabilities of Thought: A Reasoning Boundary Framework to Quantify and Optimize Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 56
  5. 2023Large Language Models in Education: Vision and Opportunitiescited by 54
  6. 2024LLMs Beyond English: Scaling the Multilingual Capability of LLMs with Cross-Lingual Feedbackcited by 51
  7. 2024Multilingual Large Language Model: A Survey of Resources, Taxonomy and Frontierscited by 49
  8. 2023HAE-RAE Bench: Evaluation of Korean Knowledge in Language Modelscited by 47
  9. 2023Democratizing LLMs for Low-Resource Languages by Leveraging their English Dominant Abilities with Linguistically-Diverse Promptscited by 45
  10. 2024Ethical Reasoning and Moral Value Alignment of LLMs Depend on the Language we Prompt them incited by 45
  11. 2024Question Translation Training for Better Multilingual Reasoningcited by 41
  12. 2025Understand, Solve and Translate: Bridging the Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning Gapcited by 41
  13. 2024Language Ranker: A Metric for Quantifying LLM Performance Across High and Low-Resource Languagescited by 38
  14. 2023GPTAraEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Arabic NLPcited by 37
  15. 2024Enhancing Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models through Self-Distillation from Resource-Rich Languagescited by 36
  16. 2023Empowering Cross-lingual Abilities of Instruction-tuned Large Language Models by Translation-following demonstrationscited by 34
  17. 2024AdaMergeX: Cross-Lingual Transfer with Large Language Models via Adaptive Adapter Mergingcited by 34
  18. 2024Understanding Cross-Lingual Alignment -- A Surveycited by 34
  19. 2023Foundation Metrics for Evaluating Effectiveness of Healthcare Conversations Powered by Generative AIcited by 32
  20. 2024On the Challenges and Opportunities in Generative AIcited by 31
  21. 2024Is Translation All You Need? A Study on Solving Multilingual Tasks with Large Language Modelscited by 31
  22. 2025TreeReview: A Dynamic Tree of Questions Framework for Deep and Efficient LLM-based Scientific Peer Reviewcited by 31
  23. 2025ECLeKTic: a Novel Challenge Set for Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfercited by 28
  24. 2024Language Imbalance Driven Rewarding for Multilingual Self-improvingcited by 27
  25. 2024Bridging the Language Gaps in Large Language Models with Inference-Time Cross-Lingual Interventioncited by 24
  26. 2025Beyond English: The Impact of Prompt Translation Strategies across Languages and Tasks in Multilingual LLMscited by 22
  27. 2024MindMerger: Efficient Boosting LLM Reasoning in non-English Languagescited by 21
  28. 2023Position: Key Claims in LLM Research Have a Long Tail of Footnotescited by 20
  29. 2024Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Sequential Instructionscited by 20
  30. 2024Assessing Dialect Fairness and Robustness of Large Language Models in Reasoning Taskscited by 20
  31. 2025Paths Not Taken: Understanding and Mending the Multilingual Factual Recall Pipelinecited by 20
  32. 2025The Emergence of Abstract Thought in Large Language Models Beyond Any Languagecited by 20
  33. 2023TaCo: Enhancing Cross-Lingual Transfer for Low-Resource Languages in LLMs through Translation-Assisted Chain-of-Thought Processescited by 18
  34. 2025MPO: Multilingual Safety Alignment via Reward Gap Optimizationcited by 18
  35. 2024Efficiently Democratizing Medical LLMs for 50 Languages via a Mixture of Language Family Expertscited by 17
  36. 2024Whose Morality Do They Speak? Unraveling Cultural Bias in Multilingual Language Modelscited by 17
  37. 2023TARJAMAT: Evaluation of Bard and ChatGPT on Machine Translation of Ten Arabic Varietiescited by 16
  38. 2025MMATH: A Multilingual Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoningcited by 16

50 most cited of 163 All 163 (JSON)

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  2. 2025Could Thinking Multilingually Empower LLM Reasoning?
  3. 2025Probing Large Language Models in Reasoning and Translating Complex Linguistic Puzzles
  4. 2025How and Where to Translate? The Impact of Translation Strategies in Cross-lingual LLM Prompting
  5. 2024Eliciting Better Multilingual Structured Reasoning from LLMs through Code
  6. 2025Best-of-L: Cross-Lingual Reward Modeling for Mathematical Reasoning
  7. 2024Large Language Models are Good Multi-lingual Learners : When LLMs Meet Cross-lingual Prompts
  8. 2023Breaking the Language Barrier: Improving Cross-Lingual Reasoning with Structured Self-Attention