A Survey of Multilingual Reasoning in Language Models

Akash Ghosh, Debayan Datta, Sriparna Saha, Chirag Agarwal


Abstract
While reasoning and multilingual capabilities in Language Models (LMs) have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, their integration into a unified paradigm—multilingual reasoning—is at a nascent stage. Multilingual reasoning requires language models to handle logical reasoning across languages while addressing misalignment, biases, and challenges in low-resource settings. This survey provides the first in-depth review of multilingual reasoning in LMs. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of existing methods that leverage LMs for multilingual reasoning, specifically outlining the challenges, motivations, and foundational aspects of applying language models to reason across diverse languages. We provide an overview of the standard data resources used for training multilingual reasoning in LMs and the evaluation benchmarks employed to assess their multilingual capabilities. Next, we analyze various state-of-the-art methods and their performance on these benchmarks. Finally, we explore future research opportunities to improve multilingual reasoning in LMs, focusing on enhancing their ability to handle diverse languages and complex reasoning tasks.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.474
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8920–8936
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.474/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.474
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Akash Ghosh, Debayan Datta, Sriparna Saha, and Chirag Agarwal. 2025. A Survey of Multilingual Reasoning in Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 8920–8936, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Survey of Multilingual Reasoning in Language Models (Ghosh et al., Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.474.pdf
Checklist:
 2025.findings-emnlp.474.checklist.pdf