跨语言长链推理能力研究,发现英文外语言表现显著滞后。
Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Languages
- 对比英語推理与目标语言推理两种模式,分析各阶段影响
- 多语言预训练提升双模式性能,但翻译生成优于自动生成
- 揭示跨语言推理效率差异与特定语言失败模式
尽管大型推理模型在英语中展现出强大的长链推理(CoT)能力,但我们对这些能力如何扩展到全球绝大多数语言仍缺乏理解。本文系统研究了模型发展的四个关键阶段——规模、预训练、后训练和推理,以探究长链推理能力在非英语语言中的迁移情况。我们在九种非英语目标语言中对比两种推理设置:En-CoT(输入为目标语言,推理用英语)与Target-CoT(输入和推理均使用目标语言)。结果发现,模型规模扩大可提升En-CoT的多语言任务表现,但Target-CoT表现落后且在需要多步数学推理的任务中差距更大。预训练阶段,引入专门推理阶段增强En-CoT但损害Target-CoT;而广泛的多语言预训练则同时改善两种模式。针对其他语言高质量推理轨迹稀缺问题,我们探索合成数据构建方法,证明基于黄金英文轨迹自动翻译的推理轨迹微调效果优于从大模型蒸馏的目标语言轨迹。最后,我们报告了不同语言间的推理效率差异,并揭示了语言特异性的推理失败模式。相关模型、数据集与代码已开源,以促进后续研究。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While large reasoning models have shown remarkable ability to generate long chains-of-thought (CoTs) in English, we still lack understanding of how these long-form reasoning abilities transfer to the vast majority of the world's languages. In this work, we systematically investigate four key stages of model development--scaling, pretraining, post-training, and inference--to understand how long CoT capabilities extend beyond English. We compare two reasoning settings across nine non-English target languages: En-CoT, where models process target-language inputs, but reason in English; and Target-CoT, where models both process inputs and generate long CoTs in the target language. We find that scaling reasoning model size improves multilingual task performance in En-CoT, but Target-CoT performance lags behind. This gap widens for tasks requiring long, multi-step CoTs such as mathematical reasoning. Shifting to pretraining, we find that adding a specialized reasoning stage enhances En-CoT performance but degrades Target-CoT, whereas broad multilingual pretraining improves both modes simultaneously. Given the scarcity of high-quality reasoning traces in languages other than English, we explore synthetic data curation approaches for post-training. We demonstrate that fine-tuning on reasoning traces automatically translated from gold English traces outperforms fine-tuning on target-language traces distilled from large reasoning models. Finally, we report disparities in inference efficiency between languages and uncover language-specific failure modes in CoTs. We release models, datasets, and code to foster further research.
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