Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (**ST-Merge**) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a promising critic-free reinforcement learning paradigm for reasoning tasks. However, standard GRPO employs a coarse-grained credit assignment mechanism that propagates group-level rewards uniformly to to every token in a sequence, neglecting the varying contribution of individual reasoning steps. We address this limitation by introducing Outcome-grounded Advantage Reshaping (OAR), a fine-grained credit assignment mechanism that redistributes advantages based on how much each token influences the model’s final answer. We instantiate OAR via two complementary strategies: (1) OAR-P, which estimates outcome sensitivity through counterfactual token perturbations, serving as a high-fidelity attribution signal; (2) OAR-G, which uses an input-gradient sensitivity proxy to approximate the influence signal with a single backward pass. These importance signals are integrated with a conservative Bi-Level advantage reshaping scheme that suppresses low-impact tokens and boosts pivotal ones while preserving the overall advantage mass. Empirical results on extensive mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that while OAR-P sets the performance upper bound, OAR-G achieves comparable gains with negligible computational overhead, both significantly outperforming a strong GRPO baseline, pushing the boundaries of critic-free LLM reasoning.

Cross-lingual named entity recognition task is one of the critical problems for evaluating the potential transfer learning techniques on low resource languages. Knowledge distillation using pre-trained multilingual language models between source and target languages have shown their superiority in transfer. However, existing cross-lingual distillation models merely consider the potential transferability between two identical single tasks across both domains. Other possible auxiliary tasks to improve the learning performance have not been fully investigated. In this study, based on the knowledge distillation framework and multi-task learning, we introduce the similarity metric model as an auxiliary task to improve the cross-lingual NER performance on the target domain. Specifically, an entity recognizer and a similarity evaluator are first trained in parallel as two teachers from the source domain. Then, two tasks in the student model are supervised by these teachers simultaneously. Empirical studies on the three datasets across 7 different languages confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model.