Learn Globally, Speak Locally: Bridging the Gaps in Multilingual Reasoning

In this episode, we discuss Learn Globally, Speak Locally: Bridging the Gaps in Multilingual Reasoning by Jaedong Hwang, Kumar Tanmay, Seok-Jin Lee, Ayush Agrawal, Hamid Palangi, Kumar Ayush, Ila Fiete, Paul Pu Liang. The paper introduces GEOFACT-X, a multilingual factual reasoning benchmark with annotated reasoning traces in five languages to better evaluate language consistency in LLM reasoning. It proposes BRIDGE, a training method using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with a language-consistency reward to align model reasoning with the input language. Experiments show that BRIDGE significantly improves multilingual reasoning fidelity, highlighting the importance of reasoning-aware multilingual reinforcement learning for cross-lingual generalization.