# AutoCAP: Towards Automatic Cross-lingual Alignment Planning for Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13940/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 14 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03493/) (2022)
- [Language Models are Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03057/) (2022)
- [Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10668/) (2021)
- [M3CoT: A Novel Benchmark for Multi-Domain Multi-step Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16473/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Meet NLP: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12819/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models are In-Context Semantic Reasoners rather than Symbolic Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14825/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Large Language Model: A Survey of Resources, Taxonomy and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04925/) (2024)
- [xCoT: Cross-lingual Instruction Tuning for Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07037/) (2024)
- [Empowering Multi-step Reasoning across Languages via Tree-of-Thoughts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08097/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [The Emergence of Abstract Thought in Large Language Models Beyond Any Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09890/) (2025)
- [ViTCoT: Video-Text Interleaved Chain-of-Thought for Boosting Video Understanding in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09876/) (2025)
- [What are the Essential Factors in Crafting Effective Long Context Multi-Hop Instruction Datasets? Insights and Best Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01893/) (2024)
- [Wrong-of-Thought: An Integrated Reasoning Framework with Multi-Perspective Verification and Wrong Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04463/) (2024)
- [Understanding Multilingualism in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs: Routing Mechanism, Expert Specialization, and Layerwise Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14050/) (2026)
- [Large Reasoning Embedding Models: Towards Next-Generation Dense Retrieval Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14321/) (2025)
- [LAVCap: LLM-based Audio-Visual Captioning using Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09291/) (2025)
- [CCHall: A Novel Benchmark for Joint Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Hallucinations Detection in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19108/) (2025)
- [Lens: Rethinking Multilingual Enhancement for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04407/) (2024)
- [Exploring Prompt Engineering: A Systematic Review with SWOT Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12843/) (2024)
- [MLDebugging: Towards Benchmarking Code Debugging Across Multi-Library Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13824/) (2025)
- [Latent Visual Cache for Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02607/) (2026)
- [A Survey on Training-free Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09016/) (2025)
- [SinkTrack: Attention Sink based Context Anchoring for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10027/) (2026)
- [Uncovering inequalities in new knowledge learning by large language models across different languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04064/) (2025)
- [What Factors Affect LLMs and RLLMs in Financial Question Answering?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08339/) (2025)
- [Thinking Traps in Long Chain-of-Thought: A Measurable Study and Trap-Aware Adaptive Restart](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11940/) (2026)
- [Less Languages, Less Tokens: An Efficient Unified Logic Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20090/) (2026)
- [Bridging the English-Arabic Medical Knowledge Gap: Targeted Low-Rank Adaptation via Causal Layer Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00207/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-lingual chain-of-thought can effectively complete reasoning tasks across languages, which gains increasing attention. Recently, dominant approaches in the literature improve cross-lingual alignment capabilities by integrating reasoning knowledge from different languages. Despite achieving excellent performance, current methods still have two main challenges: (1) Manual language specification: They still highly rely on manually selecting the languages to integrate, severely affecting their generalizability; (2) Static weight allocation: Current methods simply integrate all languages equally. In fact, different language reasoning paths should have different weights to achieve better complementation and integration. Motivated by this, we introduce an Automatic Cross-lingual Alignment Planning (AutoCAP) for zero-shot chain-of-thought to address the above challenges. The core of AutoCAP consists of two components: (1) Automatic Language Selection Prompting to guide LLMs to select appropriate languages and (2) Automatic Weight Allocation Prompting to automatically allocate alignment weight scores to each reasoning path. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks reveal that AutoCAP achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing previous methods that required manual effort.