Zidi Xiong


Fixing paper assignments

  1. Please select all papers that belong to the same person.
  2. Indicate below which author they should be assigned to.
Provide a valid ORCID iD here. This will be used to match future papers to this author.
Provide the name of the school or the university where the author has received or will receive their highest degree (e.g., Ph.D. institution for researchers, or current affiliation for students). This will be used to form the new author page ID, if needed.

TODO: "submit" and "cancel" buttons here


2025

pdf bib
When Models Reason in Your Language: Controlling Thinking Language Comes at the Cost of Accuracy
Jirui Qi | Shan Chen | Zidi Xiong | Raquel Fernández | Danielle Bitterman | Arianna Bisazza
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) with thinking traces have shown strong performance on English reasoning tasks. However, the extent to which LRMs can think in other languages is less studied. This is as important as answer accuracy for real-world applications since users may find the thinking trace useful for oversight only if expressed in their languages. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate two leading families of LRMs on our established benchmark XReasoning. Surprisingly, even the most advanced models often revert to English or produce fragmented reasoning in other languages, revealing a substantial gap in the capability of thinking in non-English languages. Promoting models to reason in the user’s language via prompt hacking enhances readability and oversight. This could gain user trust, but reduces answer accuracy, exposing an important trade-off. We further demonstrate that targeted post-training, even with just 100 instances, can mitigate this language mismatch, although accuracy is still degraded. Our results reveal the limited multilingual reasoning capabilities of current LRMs and suggest directions for future research. All code and datasets are released at https://github.com/Betswish/mCoT-XReasoning.