大型推理模型(尚)不是多语言潜在推理者 / Large Reasoning Models Are (Not Yet) Multilingual Latent Reasoners
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这项研究发现,大型推理模型在多种语言中确实存在‘潜在推理’能力,即模型在生成完整文字推理步骤前就能得出正确答案,但这种能力在资源丰富的语言中较强,在低资源语言中较弱,且总体上遵循以英语为中心的推理路径。
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.
大型推理模型(尚)不是多语言潜在推理者 / Large Reasoning Models Are (Not Yet) Multilingual Latent Reasoners
这项研究发现,大型推理模型在多种语言中确实存在‘潜在推理’能力,即模型在生成完整文字推理步骤前就能得出正确答案,但这种能力在资源丰富的语言中较强,在低资源语言中较弱,且总体上遵循以英语为中心的推理路径。
源自 arXiv: 2601.02996