mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Multilingual Large Language Model: A Survey of Resources, Taxonomy and Frontiers

arXiv 2404.04925 ↗First posted 7 Apr 2024cs.CLcited by 51

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation

Abstract (arXiv)

Multilingual Large Language Models are capable of using powerful Large Language Models to handle and respond to queries in multiple languages, which achieves remarkable success in multilingual natural language processing tasks. Despite these breakthroughs, there still remains a lack of a comprehensive survey to summarize existing approaches and recent developments in this field. To this end, in this paper, we present a thorough review and provide a unified perspective to summarize the recent progress as well as emerging trends in multilingual large language models (MLLMs) literature. The contributions of this paper can be summarized: (1) First survey: to our knowledge, we take the first step and present a thorough review in MLLMs research field according to multi-lingual alignment; (2) New taxonomy: we offer a new and unified perspective to summarize the current progress of MLLMs; (3) New frontiers: we highlight several emerging frontiers and discuss the corresponding challenges; (4) Abundant resources: we collect abundant open-source resources, including relevant papers, data corpora, and leaderboards. We hope our work can provide the community with quick access and spur breakthrough research in MLLMs.

Key facts. Cited by 51 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 262 of its 352 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2024.

Builds on

262 of 352 references.

Closest ancestors · 13

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Question Translation Training for Better Multilingual Reasoning15 Jan
  2. 2024xCoT: Cross-lingual Instruction Tuning for Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning13 Jan
  3. 2024MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual Alignment-as-Preference Optimization12 Jan
  4. 2023Let's Think Outside the Box: Exploring Leap-of-Thought in Large Language Models with Creative Humor Generation5 Dec
  5. 2023TaCo: Enhancing Cross-Lingual Transfer for Low-Resource Languages in LLMs through Translation-Assisted Chain-of-Thought Processes17 Nov
  6. 2023Do Multilingual Language Models Think Better in English?2 Aug
  7. 2023LLM-powered Data Augmentation for Enhanced Cross-lingual Performance23 May
  8. 2023Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting11 May
  9. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models27 Feb
  10. 2023A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity8 Feb
  11. 2023The unreasonable effectiveness of few-shot learning for machine translation2 Feb
  12. 2022ROSCOE: A Suite of Metrics for Scoring Step-by-Step Reasoning15 Dec
1 more
  1. 2022Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?25 Feb

Other references · 249

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  3. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,512
  4. 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,326
  5. 2019Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scalecited by 3,935
  6. 2022OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Modelscited by 3,512
  7. 2023QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMscited by 3,418
  8. 2023Qwen Technical Reportcited by 3,344
  9. 2023PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Modelcited by 2,071
  10. 2022BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 1,984
  11. 2020mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformercited by 1,818
  12. 2020GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Shardingcited by 1,631
38 more
  1. 2018Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarizationcited by 1,317
  2. 2022No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translationcited by 1,312
  3. 2020BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generationcited by 1,203
  4. 2020COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluationcited by 1,033
  5. 2022Interleaving Retrieval with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Multi-Step Questionscited by 923
  6. 2018XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representationscited by 915
  7. 2022Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Taskscited by 868
  8. 2022PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Modelcited by 766
  9. 2020XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalizationcited by 742
  10. 2017Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Languagecited by 736
  11. 2023OpenAssistant Conversations -- Democratizing Large Language Model Alignmentcited by 721
  12. 2023AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Modelscited by 716
  13. 2023Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Modelscited by 670
  14. 2023WizardMath: Empowering Mathematical Reasoning for Large Language Models via Reinforced Evol-Instructcited by 625
  15. 2019On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representationscited by 578
  16. 2020Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 561
  17. 2021The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 560
  18. 2022Language Models are Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasonerscited by 530
  19. 2021ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte modelscited by 509
  20. 2020TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languagescited by 488
  21. 2019MLQA: Evaluating Cross-lingual Extractive Question Answeringcited by 340
  22. 2020XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoningcited by 333
  23. 2023Efficient and Effective Text Encoding for Chinese LLaMA and Alpacacited by 305
  24. 2023MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AIcited by 293
  25. 2021Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Language Modelscited by 278
  26. 2020Improving Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation and Zero-Shot Translationcited by 277
  27. 2023xCOMET: Transparent Machine Translation Evaluation through Fine-grained Error Detectioncited by 265
  28. 2019PAWS-X: A Cross-lingual Adversarial Dataset for Paraphrase Identificationcited by 264
  29. 2021ERNIE 3.0: Large-scale Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generationcited by 260
  30. 2023Prompting Large Language Model for Machine Translation: A Case Studycited by 250
  31. 2023ChatIE: Zero-Shot Information Extraction via Chatting with ChatGPTcited by 250
  32. 2019WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipediacited by 223
  33. 2020XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generationcited by 222
  34. 2022Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLPcited by 218
  35. 2023Language Model Tokenizers Introduce Unfairness Between Languagescited by 214
  36. 2023ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learningcited by 206
  37. 2023Do All Languages Cost the Same? Tokenization in the Era of Commercial Language Modelscited by 192
  38. 2023Okapi: Instruction-tuned Large Language Models in Multiple Languages with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 190

50 most cited of 249 All 249 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 26; 2025: 19; 2026: 6.

51 papers.

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  1. 2025Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Modelscited by 384
  2. 2025A Comprehensive Survey in LLM(-Agent) Full Stack Safety: Data, Training and Deploymentcited by 116
  3. 2024Large Language Models Meet NLP: A Surveycited by 103
  4. 2024Unlocking the Capabilities of Thought: A Reasoning Boundary Framework to Quantify and Optimize Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 56
  5. 2024What Makes and Breaks Safety Fine-tuning? A Mechanistic Studycited by 55
  6. 2025The State of Multilingual LLM Safety Research: From Measuring the Language Gap to Mitigating Itcited by 45
  7. 2025The Hidden Dimensions of LLM Alignment: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Orthogonal Safety Directionscited by 41
  8. 2024Language Ranker: A Metric for Quantifying LLM Performance Across High and Low-Resource Languagescited by 38
  9. 2025100 Days After DeepSeek-R1: A Survey on Replication Studies and More Directions for Reasoning Language Modelscited by 30
  10. 2024Undesirable Memorization in Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 29
  11. 2024Language Imbalance Driven Rewarding for Multilingual Self-improvingcited by 28
  12. 2024Scaling Laws for Multilingual Language Modelscited by 23
38 more
  1. 2024Large Language Models Lack Understanding of Character Composition of Wordscited by 22
  2. 2024Multilingual Blending: LLM Safety Alignment Evaluation with Language Mixturecited by 22
  3. 2025Youtu-GraphRAG: Vertically Unified Agents for Graph Retrieval-Augmented Complex Reasoningcited by 22
  4. 2024AutoCAP: Towards Automatic Cross-lingual Alignment Planning for Zero-shot Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 19
  5. 2024Multilingual Large Language Models: A Systematic Surveycited by 18
  6. 2025SLAM: Towards Efficient Multilingual Reasoning via Selective Language Alignmentcited by 18
  7. 2024RLSF: Fine-tuning LLMs via Symbolic Feedbackcited by 14
  8. 2025XIFBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Multilingual Instruction Followingcited by 11
  9. 2025Improving Multilingual Language Models by Aligning Representations through Steeringcited by 11
  10. 2026Crosslingual On-Policy Self-Distillation for Multilingual Reasoningcited by 10
  11. 2025MrGuard: A Multilingual Reasoning Guardrail for Universal LLM Safetycited by 9
  12. 2024Structure-aware Domain Knowledge Injection for Large Language Modelscited by 6
  13. 2024Lens: Rethinking Multilingual Enhancement for Large Language Modelscited by 6
  14. 2025Multilingual Prompt Engineering in Large Language Models: A Survey Across NLP Taskscited by 6
  15. 2024Transfer Attack for Bad and Good: Explain and Boost Adversarial Transferability across Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 5
  16. 2024Foundation Models for Low-Resource Language Education (Vision Paper)cited by 5
  17. 2025Reasoning Transfer for an Extremely Low-Resource and Endangered Language: Bridging Languages Through Sample-Efficient Language Understandingcited by 5
  18. 2024Mixed Text Recognition with Efficient Parameter Fine-Tuning and Transformercited by 4
  19. 2024Responsible Multilingual Large Language Models: A Survey of Development, Applications, and Societal Impactcited by 3
  20. 2024One Mind, Many Tongues: A Deep Dive into Language-Agnostic Knowledge Neurons in Large Language Modelscited by 3
  21. 2024Extending LLMs to New Languages: A Case Study of Llama and Persian Adaptationcited by 3
  22. 2025When Language Shapes Thought: Cross-Lingual Transfer of Factual Knowledge in Question Answeringcited by 3
  23. 2026Language Steering for Multilingual In-Context Learningcited by 3
  24. 2024Optimizing Large Language Models for Turkish: New Methodologies in Corpus Selection and Trainingcited by 2
  25. 2024Exploring Cross-lingual Latent Transplantation: Mutual Opportunities and Open Challengescited by 2
  26. 2025BadLingual: A Novel Lingual-Backdoor Attack against Large Language Modelscited by 2
  27. 2025KROMA: Ontology Matching with Knowledge Retrieval and Large Language Modelscited by 2
  28. 2025SASFT: Sparse Autoencoder-guided Supervised Finetuning to Mitigate Unexpected Code-Switching in LLMscited by 2
  29. 2025MERLIN: Multi-Stage Curriculum Alignment for Multilingual Encoder-LLM Integration in Cross-Lingual Reasoningcited by 2
  30. 2026Language as a Latent Variable for Reasoning Optimizationcited by 2
  31. 2024Development of a Large-scale Dataset of Chest Computed Tomography Reports in Japanese and a High-performance Finding Classification Modelcited by 1
  32. 2025Uncovering inequalities in new knowledge learning by large language models across different languagescited by 1
  33. 2025iDETEX: Empowering MLLMs for Intelligent DETailed EXplainable IQAcited by 1
  34. 2024CELLM: An Efficient Communication in Large Language Models Training for Federated Learningcited by 0
  35. 2024Personal Intelligence System UniLM: Hybrid On-Device Small Language Model and Server-Based Large Language Model for Malay Nusantaracited by 0
  36. 2024Improving Bilingual Capabilities of Language Models to Support Diverse Linguistic Practices in Educationcited by 0
  37. 2026Culturally-Grounded Governance for Multilingual Language Models: Rights, Data Boundaries, and Accountable AI Designcited by 0
  38. 2026Bilingual Text-to-Motion Generation: A New Benchmark and Baselinescited by 0

50 most cited of 51 All 51 (JSON)

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  2. 2024The Synergy between Data and Multi-Modal Large Language Models: A Survey from Co-Development Perspective
  3. 2024Personalized Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey
  4. 2023A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models
  5. 2024What Drives Performance in Multilingual Language Models?
  6. 2024A Survey of Multimodal Large Language Model from A Data-centric Perspective
  7. 2024FuxiTranyu: A Multilingual Large Language Model Trained with Balanced Data
  8. 2024Pruning Multilingual Large Language Models for Multilingual Inference