mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Moral Reasoning Across Languages: The Critical Role of Low-Resource Languages in LLMs

arXiv 2504.19759 ↗First posted 28 Apr 2025cs.CLcited by 3

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation

Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce the Multilingual Moral Reasoning Benchmark (MMRB) to evaluate the moral reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) across five typologically diverse languages and three levels of contextual complexity: sentence, paragraph, and document. Our results show moral reasoning performance degrades with increasing context complexity, particularly for low-resource languages such as Vietnamese. We further fine-tune the open-source LLaMA-3-8B model using curated monolingual data for alignment and poisoning. Surprisingly, low-resource languages have a stronger impact on multilingual reasoning than high-resource ones, highlighting their critical role in multilingual NLP.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 8 of its 17 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2025.

Builds on

8 of 17 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Do Moral Judgment and Reasoning Capability of LLMs Change with Language? A Study using the Multilingual Defining Issues Test3 Feb
  2. 2023Rethinking Machine Ethics -- Can LLMs Perform Moral Reasoning through the Lens of Moral Theories?29 Aug

Other references · 6

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
  2. 2024LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Modelscited by 1,464
  3. 2020Aligning AI With Shared Human Valuescited by 723
  4. 2022The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue Systemscited by 93
  5. 2023Ethical Reasoning over Moral Alignment: A Case and Framework for In-Context Ethical Policies in LLMscited by 64
  6. 2023"Oops, Did I Just Say That?" Testing and Repairing Unethical Suggestions of Large Language Models with Suggest-Critique-Reflect Processcited by 9

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

  1. 2026Untangling Input Language from Reasoning Language: A Diagnostic Framework for Cross-Lingual Moral Alignment in LLMscited by 1
  2. 2026HiMed: Incentivizing Hindi Reasoning in Medical LLMscited by 0
  3. 2026MET: Theory-Grounded and Culture-Aware Multilingual Moral Reasoningcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025One Model, Many Morals: Uncovering Cross-Linguistic Misalignments in Computational Moral Reasoning
  2. 2024Ethical Reasoning and Moral Value Alignment of LLMs Depend on the Language we Prompt them in
  3. 2024Whose Morality Do They Speak? Unraveling Cultural Bias in Multilingual Language Models
  4. 2025Structured Moral Reasoning in Language Models: A Value-Grounded Evaluation Framework
  5. 2025Are Rules Meant to be Broken? Understanding Multilingual Moral Reasoning as a Computational Pipeline with UniMoral
  6. 2024MoralBench: Moral Evaluation of LLMs
  7. 2025Diagnosing Moral Reasoning Acquisition in Language Models: Pragmatics and Generalization
  8. 2024Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems