{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.
- Published in:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop) - Type:
Inproceedings - Authors:
- Year:
2026 - Source:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-srw.107/
Citation information
: {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,
@Inproceedings{Shomali.etal.2026a,
author={Shomali, Behzad; Victor, Luisa; Selbach, Tim; Bashir, Ali Hamza; Berghaus, David; Koehler, Joachim; Ali, Mehdi; Frey, Markus},
title={{LLM} Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)},
pages={1212--1235},
month={June},
publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)},
url={https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-srw.107/},
year={2026},
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...}}