{LLM} Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?

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.

  • Veröffentlicht in:
    Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
  • Typ:
    Inproceedings
  • Autoren:
    Shomali, Behzad; Victor, Luisa; Selbach, Tim; Bashir, Ali Hamza; Berghaus, David; Koehler, Joachim; Ali, Mehdi; Frey, Markus
  • Jahr:
    2026
  • Source:
    https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-srw.107/

Informationen zur Zitierung

Shomali, Behzad; Victor, Luisa; Selbach, Tim; Bashir, Ali Hamza; Berghaus, David; Koehler, Joachim; Ali, Mehdi; Frey, Markus: {LLM} Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?, Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), 2026, 1212--1235, June, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-srw.107/, Shomali.etal.2026a,

Assoziierte Lamarr-ForscherInnen

Photo. Portrait of Mehdi Ali.

Dr. Mehdi Ali

Lead Scientist Foundation Models NLP zum Profil
Photo. Portrait of David Berghaus.

Dr. David Berghaus

Postdoctoral Researcher NLP zum Profil