Papers
arxiv:2601.02996

Large Reasoning Models Are (Not Yet) Multilingual Latent Reasoners

Published on Jan 6
· Submitted by
Yihong Liu
on Jan 7
Authors:
,
,

Abstract

Large reasoning models exhibit multilingual latent reasoning capabilities with varying strength across languages and benchmarks, showing consistent internal prediction evolution despite surface-level differences.

AI-generated summary

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at the correct answer before completing these textual reasoning steps, indicating the presence of latent reasoning -- internal, non-verbal computation encoded in hidden states. While this phenomenon has been explored in English, its multilingual behavior remains largely unknown. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation of multilingual latent reasoning in LRMs across 11 languages. Using a truncation-based strategy, we examine how the correct answer emerges as the model is given only partial reasoning traces, allowing us to measure stepwise latent prediction formation. Our results reveal clear evidence of multilingual latent reasoning, though unevenly: strong in resource-rich languages, weaker in low-resource ones, and broadly less observable on harder benchmarks. To understand whether these differences reflect distinct internal mechanisms, we further perform representational analyses. Despite surface-level disparities, we find that the internal evolution of predictions is highly consistent across languages and broadly aligns with English -- a pattern suggesting an English-centered latent reasoning pathway.

Community

Paper author Paper submitter

This is an automated message from the Librarian Bot. I found the following papers similar to this paper.

The following papers were recommended by the Semantic Scholar API

Please give a thumbs up to this comment if you found it helpful!

If you want recommendations for any Paper on Hugging Face checkout this Space

You can directly ask Librarian Bot for paper recommendations by tagging it in a comment: @librarian-bot recommend

Sign up or log in to comment

Models citing this paper 0

No model linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2601.02996 in a model README.md to link it from this page.

Datasets citing this paper 0

No dataset linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2601.02996 in a dataset README.md to link it from this page.

Spaces citing this paper 0

No Space linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2601.02996 in a Space README.md to link it from this page.

Collections including this paper 1