@inproceedings{ahuja-etal-2025-efficientxlang,
    title = "{E}fficient{XL}ang: Towards Improving Token Efficiency Through Cross-Lingual Reasoning",
    author = "Ahuja, Sanchit  and
      Vaddamanu, Praneetha  and
      Patra, Barun",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.845/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.845",
    pages = "15612--15624",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "Despite recent advances in Reasoning Language Models (RLMs), most research focuses solely on English, even though many models are pretrained on multilingual data. In this work, we investigate: Is English the most token-efficient language for reasoning? We evaluate three open-source RLMs: DeepSeek R1, Qwen 2.5, and Qwen 3, across four math datasets and seven typologically diverse languages. We find that reasoning in non-English languages not only reduces token usage, but also preserves accuracy. These gains persist even after translating the reasoning traces into English, suggesting genuine shifts in reasoning behavior rather than surface-level linguistic effects. The extent of improvement, however, depends on the model{'}s multilingual strength. Our findings motivate a broader view of reasoning in language models, highlighting the potential of multilingual reasoning and the importance of strong multilingual foundations. The code for our work can be found: https://github.com/microsoft/EfficientXLang."
}