LLM Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:LLM Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?
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.
| Comments: | 5 pages. Accepted at ACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) 2026. Code: this https URL Translated Datasets: this https URL Webpage: https://math-across-languages.github.io |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.18453 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2606.18453v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.18453
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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