# LangBridge: Multilingual Reasoning Without Multilingual Supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10695 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10695/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 27 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [StarCoder: may the source be with you!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06161/) (2023)
- [MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12284/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Struggle to Learn Long-Tail Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08411/) (2022)
- [Scaling Relationship on Learning Mathematical Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01825/) (2023)
- [Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02707/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10668/) (2021)
- [Mind the Gap: Assessing Temporal Generalization in Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01951/) (2021)
- [Okapi: Instruction-tuned Large Language Models in Multiple Languages with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16039/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT A Good Translator? Yes With GPT-4 As The Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08745/) (2023)
- [Orca 2: Teaching Small Language Models How to Reason](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11045/) (2023)
- [OpenWebMath: An Open Dataset of High-Quality Mathematical Web Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06786/) (2023)
- [Linearly Mapping from Image to Text Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15162/) (2022)
- [Extrapolating Large Language Models to Non-English by Aligning Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04948/) (2023)
- [Breaking Language Barriers in Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Insights and Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20246/) (2023)
- [Turning English-centric LLMs Into Polyglots: How Much Multilinguality Is Needed?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12683/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [The BiGGen Bench: A Principled Benchmark for Fine-grained Evaluation of Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05761/) (2024)
- [Crosslingual Reasoning through Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05408/) (2025)
- [MM-Eval: A Multilingual Meta-Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-as-a-Judge and Reward Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17578/) (2024)
- [LLMs are Also Effective Embedding Models: An In-depth Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12591/) (2024)
- [MindMerger: Efficient Boosting LLM Reasoning in non-English Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17386/) (2024)
- [Language-Specific Latent Process Hinders Cross-Lingual Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13141/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11072/) (2024)
- [SLAM: Towards Efficient Multilingual Reasoning via Selective Language Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03681/) (2025)
- [Improving Multilingual Language Models by Aligning Representations through Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12584/) (2025)
- [Cross-lingual Collapse: How Language-Centric Foundation Models Shape Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05850/) (2025)
- [When Life Gives You Samples: The Benefits of Scaling up Inference Compute for Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20544/) (2025)
- [The Power of Question Translation Training in Multilingual Reasoning: Broadened Scope and Deepened Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01345/) (2024)
- [Thanos: Enhancing Conversational Agents with Skill-of-Mind-Infused Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04496/) (2024)
- [LUSIFER: Language Universal Space Integration for Enhanced Multilingual Embeddings with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00874/) (2025)
- [Teaching LLMs at Charles University: Assignments and Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19798/) (2024)
- [Utilizing Multilingual Encoders to Improve Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09091/) (2025)
- [Languages are Modalities: Cross-Lingual Alignment via Encoder Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27254/) (2025)
- [The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11470/) (2026)
- [MET: Theory-Grounded and Culture-Aware Multilingual Moral Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11736/) (2026)
- [Bridging the English-Arabic Medical Knowledge Gap: Targeted Low-Rank Adaptation via Causal Layer Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00207/) (2026)
- [Building Multilingual Bridges: Data Mixing as the Pillar of Generalization for In-Language Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10445/) (2026)
- [Cross-Lingual Alignment for Decoder-Only Models using MoE Routers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01921/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce LangBridge, a zero-shot approach to adapt language models for multilingual reasoning tasks without multilingual supervision. LangBridge operates by bridging two models, each specialized in different aspects: (1) one specialized in understanding multiple languages (e.g., mT5 encoder) and (2) one specialized in reasoning (e.g., MetaMath). LangBridge connects the two models by introducing minimal trainable parameters between them. Despite utilizing only English data for training, LangBridge considerably enhances the performance of language models on low-resource languages across mathematical reasoning, code completion, logical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning. Our analysis suggests that the efficacy of LangBridge stems from the language-agnostic characteristics of multilingual representations. We publicly release our code and models.