@inproceedings{shomali-etal-2026-llm,
    title = "{LLM} Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?",
    author = "Shomali, Behzad  and
      Victor, Luisa  and
      Selbach, Tim  and
      Bashir, Ali Hamza  and
      Berghaus, David  and
      Koehler, Joachim  and
      Ali, Mehdi  and
      Frey, Markus",
    editor = "T.Y.S.S., Santosh  and
      Rodriguez, Juan Diego  and
      de Gibert, Ona",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-srw.107/",
    pages = "1212--1235",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-393-7",
    abstract = "Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial cross-lingual variation in mathematical reasoning performance, but it remains unclear whether these differences reflect language-specific parameters or a shared mechanism that manifests differently by language. We present a cross-lingual mechanistic analysis of mathematical reasoning in LLMs, enabling us to localize and compare model parameters that support mathematical reasoning across languages. We find that the extracted math-associated parameters exhibit partial cross-lingual overlap, with the strongest overlap concentrated in intermediate model layers.We further observe that English consistently produces the largest set of math-relevant parameters, whereas lower-resource languages reveal smaller sets of relevant parameters. These results suggest that math-related behavior in multilingual LLMs is neither fully language-invariant nor fully language-specific, but instead exhibits partial cross-lingual parameter overlap with systematic language-dependent differences."
}