{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:
    Shomali, Behzad; Victor, Luisa; Selbach, Tim; Bashir, Ali Hamza; Berghaus, David; Koehler, Joachim; Ali, Mehdi; Frey, Markus
  • Year:
    2026
  • Source:
    https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-srw.107/

Citation information

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,

Associated Lamarr Researchers

Photo. Portrait of David Berghaus.

Dr. David Berghaus

Postdoctoral Researcher NLP to the profile
Photo. Portrait of Mehdi Ali.

Dr. Mehdi Ali

Lead Scientist Foundation Models NLP to the profile