mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Survey of Multilingual Reasoning in Language Models

arXiv 2502.09457 ↗First posted 13 Feb 2025cs.CLcited by 31

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation

Abstract (arXiv)

While reasoning and multilingual capabilities in language models (LMs) have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, their integration into a unified paradigm - multilingual reasoning - is at a nascent stage. Multilingual reasoning requires language models to handle logical reasoning across languages while addressing misalignment, biases, and challenges in low-resource settings. This survey provides the first in-depth review of multilingual reasoning in LMs. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of existing methods that leverage LMs for multilingual reasoning, specifically outlining the challenges, motivations, and foundational aspects of applying language models to reason across diverse languages. We provide an overview of the standard data resources used for training multilingual reasoning in LMs and the evaluation benchmarks employed to assess their multilingual capabilities. Next, we analyze various state-of-the-art methods and their performance on these benchmarks. Finally, we explore future research opportunities to improve multilingual reasoning in LMs, focusing on enhancing their ability to handle diverse languages and complex reasoning tasks. Rapid growth of evolving developments in this field can be actively tracked on our project page: [https://github.com/AkashGhosh/Survey-of-Multilingual-Reasoning-in-Language-Models](https://github.com/AkashGhosh/Survey-of-Multilingual-Reasoning-in-Language-Models)

Key facts. Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 45 of its 85 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2025.

Builds on

45 of 85 references.

Closest ancestors · 12

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025SLAM: Towards Efficient Multilingual Reasoning via Selective Language Alignment7 Jan
  2. 2024Towards Robust Knowledge Representations in Multilingual LLMs for Equivalence and Inheritance based Consistent Reasoning18 Oct
  3. 2024Evaluating Multilingual Long-Context Models for Retrieval and Reasoning26 Sep
  4. 2024HDFlow: Enhancing LLM Complex Problem-Solving with Hybrid Thinking and Dynamic Workflows25 Sep
  5. 2024MindMerger: Efficient Boosting LLM Reasoning in non-English Languages27 May
  6. 2024The Power of Question Translation Training in Multilingual Reasoning: Broadened Scope and Deepened Insights2 May
  7. 2024Exploring the Limitations of Large Language Models in Compositional Relation Reasoning5 Mar
  8. 2024Eliciting Better Multilingual Structured Reasoning from LLMs through Code5 Mar
  9. 2024Python is Not Always the Best Choice: Embracing Multilingual Program of Thoughts16 Feb
  10. 2024Do Moral Judgment and Reasoning Capability of LLMs Change with Language? A Study using the Multilingual Defining Issues Test3 Feb
  11. 2024Question Translation Training for Better Multilingual Reasoning15 Jan
  12. 2024MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual Alignment-as-Preference Optimization12 Jan

Other references · 33

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
  3. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  4. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,768
  5. 2017A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inferencecited by 2,665
  6. 2018XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representationscited by 913
  7. 2019MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalismscited by 653
  8. 2021The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 556
  9. 2022Language Models are Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasonerscited by 518
  10. 2020XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoningcited by 330
  11. 2023Okapi: Instruction-tuned Large Language Models in Multiple Languages with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 189
  12. 2024ARGS: Alignment as Reward-Guided Searchcited by 99
21 more
  1. 2024A Survey on Multilingual Large Language Models: Corpora, Alignment, and Biascited by 82
  2. 2024M-RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models in Multilingual Settingscited by 50
  3. 2023CLIPSyntel: CLIP and LLM Synergy for Multimodal Question Summarization in Healthcarecited by 43
  4. 2025Understand, Solve and Translate: Bridging the Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning Gapcited by 41
  5. 2024MM-Eval: A Multilingual Meta-Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-as-a-Judge and Reward Modelscited by 34
  6. 2023Improving In-context Learning of Multilingual Generative Language Models with Cross-lingual Alignmentcited by 33
  7. 2024On the Impact of Fine-Tuning on Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 32
  8. 2024mCoT: Multilingual Instruction Tuning for Reasoning Consistency in Language Modelscited by 31
  9. 2024CRUXEval-X: A Benchmark for Multilingual Code Reasoning, Understanding and Executioncited by 31
  10. 2024P-MMEval: A Parallel Multilingual Multitask Benchmark for Consistent Evaluation of LLMscited by 29
  11. 2024Language Imbalance Driven Rewarding for Multilingual Self-improvingcited by 27
  12. 2024Reuse Your Rewards: Reward Model Transfer for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Alignmentcited by 26
  13. 2024MEXA: Multilingual Evaluation of English-Centric LLMs via Cross-Lingual Alignmentcited by 25
  14. 2022Lego-MT: Learning Detachable Models for Massively Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 21
  15. 2016Continuous multilinguality with language vectorscited by 20
  16. 2024MedSumm: A Multimodal Approach to Summarizing Code-Mixed Hindi-English Clinical Queriescited by 19
  17. 2023One Law, Many Languages: Benchmarking Multilingual Legal Reasoning for Judicial Supportcited by 15
  18. 2022A Survey on Medical Document Summarizationcited by 14
  19. 2024What Is Missing in Multilingual Visual Reasoning and How to Fix Itcited by 7
  20. 2024Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Advancing Open-Source LLMs in Hindi and Englishcited by 5
  21. 2024Mufu: Multilingual Fused Learning for Low-Resource Translation with LLMcited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 21; 2026: 10.

31 papers.

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  1. 2025Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Modelscited by 381
  2. 2025PolyMath: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning in Multilingual Contextscited by 52
  3. 2025Crosslingual Reasoning through Test-Time Scalingcited by 46
  4. 2025When Less Language is More: Language-Reasoning Disentanglement Makes LLMs Better Multilingual Reasonerscited by 16
  5. 2025Language Models' Factuality Depends on the Language of Inquirycited by 14
  6. 2025SANSKRITI: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models' Knowledge of Indian Culturecited by 14
  7. 2025When Models Reason in Your Language: Controlling Thinking Language Comes at the Cost of Accuracycited by 13
  8. 2025An Efficient and Precise Training Data Construction Framework for Process-supervised Reward Model in Mathematical Reasoningcited by 12
  9. 2026CURE-Med: Curriculum-Informed Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Medical Reasoningcited by 8
  10. 2025Relic: Enhancing Reward Model Generalization for Low-Resource Indic Languages with Few-Shot Examplescited by 6
  11. 2025Bhaasha, Bhasa, Zaban: A Survey for Low-Resourced Languages in South Asia -- Current Stage and Challengescited by 6
  12. 2025A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: Performance, Consistency, and Faithfulness Across Languagescited by 6
19 more
  1. 2026Gained in Translation: Privileged Pairwise Judges Enhance Multilingual Reasoningcited by 6
  2. 2025Reasoning Transfer for an Extremely Low-Resource and Endangered Language: Bridging Languages Through Sample-Efficient Language Understandingcited by 5
  3. 2025Multilingual Test-Time Scaling via Initial Thought Transfercited by 5
  4. 2025IRLBench: A Multi-modal, Culturally Grounded, Parallel Irish-English Benchmark for Open-Ended LLM Reasoning Evaluationcited by 4
  5. 2025The Price of Thought: A Multilingual Analysis of Reasoning, Performance, and Cost of Negotiation in Large Language Modelscited by 4
  6. 2025Less Data Less Tokens: Multilingual Unification Learning for Efficient Test-Time Reasoning in LLMscited by 3
  7. 2026Cross-lingual Self-Consistency for Multilingual Reasoning with Language Modelscited by 3
  8. 2026Rethinking the Multilingual Reasoning Gap with Layer Swapcited by 2
  9. 2025LinguaMark: Do Multimodal Models Speak Fairly? A Benchmark-Based Evaluationcited by 1
  10. 2025SoT: Structured-of-Thought Prompting Guides Multilingual Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 1
  11. 2025The Riddle of Reflection: Evaluating Reasoning and Self-Awareness in Multilingual LLMs using Indian Riddlescited by 1
  12. 2026The Fragility of Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Across Typologically Diverse Languagescited by 1
  13. 2025Toward Robust Multilingual Adaptation of LLMs for Low-Resource Languagescited by 0
  14. 2025Culturally Grounded Physical Commonsense Reasoning in Italian and English: A Submission to the MRL 2025 Shared Taskcited by 0
  15. 2026XLGoBench: Detecting cross-lingual skill gaps with algorithmic taskscited by 0
  16. 2026Translate-R1: Cost-Aware Translation Tool Use via Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  17. 2026The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modescited by 0
  18. 2026ADAGE: A Language-Agnostic Pipeline for Analogical Reasoning Evaluationcited by 0
  19. 2026MMTClinic: Multimodal, Multilingual Time Series Question Answering and Reasoning Benchmark for Clinical Domaincited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Language Matters: How Do Multilingual Input and Reasoning Paths Affect Large Reasoning Models?
  2. 2025MultiNRC: A Challenging and Native Multilingual Reasoning Evaluation Benchmark for LLMs
  3. 2025Why Do Multilingual Reasoning Gaps Emerge in Reasoning Language Models?
  4. 2025Could Thinking Multilingually Empower LLM Reasoning?
  5. 2022Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey
  6. 2026What Makes Good Multilingual Reasoning? Disentangling Traces with Measurable Features
  7. 2025Cross-Lingual Consistency: A Novel Inference Framework for Advancing Reasoning in Large Language Models
  8. 2025Learn Globally, Speak Locally: Bridging the Gaps in Multilingual Reasoning