# A Survey of Multilingual Reasoning in Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09457 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09457/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13319/) (2019)
- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03057/) (2022)
- [XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00333/) (2020)
- [Okapi: Instruction-tuned Large Language Models in Multiple Languages with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16039/) (2023)
- [ARGS: Alignment as Reward-Guided Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01694/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Multilingual Large Language Models: Corpora, Alignment, and Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00929/) (2024)
- [MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual Alignment-as-Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06838/) (2024)
- [M-RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models in Multilingual Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15522/) (2024)
- [CLIPSyntel: CLIP and LLM Synergy for Multimodal Question Summarization in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11541/) (2023)
- [Understand, Solve and Translate: Bridging the Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02448/) (2025)
- [Question Translation Training for Better Multilingual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07817/) (2024)
- [MM-Eval: A Multilingual Meta-Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-as-a-Judge and Reward Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17578/) (2024)
- [Improving In-context Learning of Multilingual Generative Language Models with Cross-lingual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08089/) (2023)
- [mCoT: Multilingual Instruction Tuning for Reasoning Consistency in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02301/) (2024)
- [On the Impact of Fine-Tuning on Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15382/) (2024)
- [CRUXEval-X: A Benchmark for Multilingual Code Reasoning, Understanding and Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13001/) (2024)
- [P-MMEval: A Parallel Multilingual Multitask Benchmark for Consistent Evaluation of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09116/) (2024)
- [Language Imbalance Driven Rewarding for Multilingual Self-improving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08964/) (2024)
- [Reuse Your Rewards: Reward Model Transfer for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12318/) (2024)
- [MEXA: Multilingual Evaluation of English-Centric LLMs via Cross-Lingual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05873/) (2024)
- [Lego-MT: Learning Detachable Models for Massively Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10551/) (2022)
- [MindMerger: Efficient Boosting LLM Reasoning in non-English Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17386/) (2024)
- [Continuous multilinguality with language vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07486/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [PolyMath: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning in Multilingual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18428/) (2025)
- [Crosslingual Reasoning through Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05408/) (2025)
- [When Less Language is More: Language-Reasoning Disentanglement Makes LLMs Better Multilingual Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15257/) (2025)
- [SANSKRITI: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models' Knowledge of Indian Culture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15355/) (2025)
- [Language Models' Factuality Depends on the Language of Inquiry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17955/) (2025)
- [When Models Reason in Your Language: Controlling Thinking Language Comes at the Cost of Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22888/) (2025)
- [An Efficient and Precise Training Data Construction Framework for Process-supervised Reward Model in Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02382/) (2025)
- [CURE-Med: Curriculum-Informed Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13262/) (2026)
- [A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: Performance, Consistency, and Faithfulness Across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09555/) (2025)
- [Relic: Enhancing Reward Model Generalization for Low-Resource Indic Languages with Few-Shot Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16502/) (2025)
- [Bhaasha, Bhasa, Zaban: A Survey for Low-Resourced Languages in South Asia -- Current Stage and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11570/) (2025)
- [Gained in Translation: Privileged Pairwise Judges Enhance Multilingual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18722/) (2026)
- [Reasoning Transfer for an Extremely Low-Resource and Endangered Language: Bridging Languages Through Sample-Efficient Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02890/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Test-Time Scaling via Initial Thought Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15508/) (2025)
- [The Price of Thought: A Multilingual Analysis of Reasoning, Performance, and Cost of Negotiation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08098/) (2025)
- [IRLBench: A Multi-modal, Culturally Grounded, Parallel Irish-English Benchmark for Open-Ended LLM Reasoning Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13498/) (2025)
- [Less Data Less Tokens: Multilingual Unification Learning for Efficient Test-Time Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18341/) (2025)
- [Cross-lingual Self-Consistency for Multilingual Reasoning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01464/) (2026)
- [SoT: Structured-of-Thought Prompting Guides Multilingual Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02648/) (2025)
- [The Riddle of Reflection: Evaluating Reasoning and Self-Awareness in Multilingual LLMs using Indian Riddles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00960/) (2025)
- [Rethinking the Multilingual Reasoning Gap with Layer Swap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26735/) (2026)
- [LinguaMark: Do Multimodal Models Speak Fairly? A Benchmark-Based Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07274/) (2025)
- [BhashaSutra: A Task-Centric Unified Survey of Indian NLP Datasets, Corpora, and Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18423/) (2026)
- [The Fragility of Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Across Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27901/) (2026)
- [Toward Robust Multilingual Adaptation of LLMs for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14466/) (2025)
- [Culturally Grounded Physical Commonsense Reasoning in Italian and English: A Submission to the MRL 2025 Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22631/) (2025)
- [XLGoBench: Detecting cross-lingual skill gaps with algorithmic tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30788/) (2026)
- [Translate-R1: Cost-Aware Translation Tool Use via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06835/) (2026)
- [The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11470/) (2026)

## 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)