Abstract:Long reasoning models often struggle in multilingual settings: they tend to reason in English for non-English questions; when constrained to reasoning in the question language, accuracies drop substantially. The struggle is caused by the limited abilities for both multilingual question understanding and multilingual reasoning. To address both problems, we propose TRIT (Translation-Reasoning Integrated Training), a self-improving framework that integrates the training of translation into multilingual reasoning. Without external feedback or additional multilingual data, our method jointly enhances multilingual question understanding and response generation. On MMATH, our method outperforms multiple baselines by an average of 7 percentage points, improving both answer correctness and language consistency. Further analysis reveals that integrating translation training improves cross-lingual question alignment by over 10 percentage points and enhances translation quality for both mathematical questions and general-domain text, with gains up to 8.4 COMET points on FLORES-200.
Abstract:Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown strong promise for LLM-based machine translation, with recent methods such as GRPO demonstrating notable gains; nevertheless, translation-oriented RL remains challenged by noisy learning signals arising from Monte Carlo return estimation, as well as a large trajectory space that favors global exploration over fine-grained local optimization. We introduce \textbf{PEGRL}, a \textit{two-stage} RL framework that uses post-editing as an auxiliary task to stabilize training and guide overall optimization. At each iteration, translation outputs are sampled to construct post-editing inputs, allowing return estimation in the post-editing stage to benefit from conditioning on the current translation behavior, while jointly supporting both global exploration and fine-grained local optimization. A task-specific weighting scheme further balances the contributions of translation and post-editing objectives, yielding a biased yet more sample-efficient estimator. Experiments on English$\to$Finnish, English$\to$Turkish, and English$\leftrightarrow$Chinese show consistent gains over RL baselines, and for English$\to$Turkish, performance on COMET-KIWI is comparable to advanced LLM-based systems (DeepSeek-V3.2).
Abstract:Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, yet they remain fundamentally limited by a \emph{blind self-thinking} paradigm: performing extensive internal reasoning even when critical information is missing or ambiguous. We propose Proactive Interactive Reasoning (PIR), a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs from passive solvers into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. Unlike existing search- or tool-based frameworks that primarily address knowledge uncertainty by querying external environments, PIR targets premise- and intent-level uncertainty through direct interaction with the user. PIR is implemented via two core components: (1) an uncertainty-aware supervised fine-tuning procedure that equips models with interactive reasoning capability, and (2) a user-simulator-based policy optimization framework driven by a composite reward that aligns model behavior with user intent. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing demonstrate that PIR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to 32.70\% higher accuracy, 22.90\% higher pass rate, and 41.36 BLEU improvement, while reducing nearly half of the reasoning computation and unnecessary interaction turns. Further reliability evaluations on factual knowledge, question answering, and missing-premise scenarios confirm the strong generalization and robustness of PIR. Model and code are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/SUAT-AIRI/Proactive-Interactive-R1}
Abstract:Despite the impressive reasoning abilities demonstrated by large language models (LLMs), empirical evidence indicates that they are not language agnostic as expected, leading to performance declines in multilingual settings, especially for low-resource languages. We attribute the decline to the model's inconsistent multilingual understanding and reasoning alignment. To address this, we present Pivot-Aligned Self-Feedback Multilingual Reasoning (PASMR), aiming to improve the alignment of multilingual math reasoning abilities in LLMs. This approach designates the model's primary language as the pivot language. During training, the model first translates questions into the pivot language to facilitate better alignment of reasoning patterns. The reasoning process in the target language is then supervised by the pivot language's reasoning answers, thereby establishing a cross-lingual self-feedback mechanism without relying on external correct answers or reward models. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method enhances both the model's understanding of questions and its reasoning capabilities, leading to notable task improvements.




Abstract:Mathematical reasoning is a primary indicator of large language models (LLMs) intelligence. However, existing LLMs exhibit failures of robustness and generalization. This paper attributes these deficiencies to spurious reasoning, i.e., producing answers from superficial features. To address this challenge, we propose the AdaR framework to enable adaptive reasoning, wherein models rely on problem-solving logic to produce answers. AdaR synthesizes logically equivalent queries by varying variable values, and trains models with RLVR on these data to penalize spurious logic while encouraging adaptive logic. To improve data quality, we extract the problem-solving logic from the original query and generate the corresponding answer by code execution, then apply a sanity check. Experimental results demonstrate that AdaR improves robustness and generalization, achieving substantial improvement in mathematical reasoning while maintaining high data efficiency. Analysis indicates that data synthesis and RLVR function in a coordinated manner to enable adaptive reasoning in LLMs. Subsequent analyses derive key design insights into the effect of critical factors and the applicability to instruct LLMs. Our project is available at https://github.com/LaiZhejian/AdaR
Abstract:We present DuPO, a dual learning-based preference optimization framework that generates annotation-free feedback via a generalized duality. DuPO addresses two key limitations: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)'s reliance on costly labels and applicability restricted to verifiable tasks, and traditional dual learning's restriction to strictly dual task pairs (e.g., translation and back-translation). Specifically, DuPO decomposes a primal task's input into known and unknown components, then constructs its dual task to reconstruct the unknown part using the primal output and known information (e.g., reversing math solutions to recover hidden variables), broadening applicability to non-invertible tasks. The quality of this reconstruction serves as a self-supervised reward to optimize the primal task, synergizing with LLMs' ability to instantiate both tasks via a single model. Empirically, DuPO achieves substantial gains across diverse tasks: it enhances the average translation quality by 2.13 COMET over 756 directions, boosts the mathematical reasoning accuracy by an average of 6.4 points on three challenge benchmarks, and enhances performance by 9.3 points as an inference-time reranker (trading computation for accuracy). These results position DuPO as a scalable, general, and annotation-free paradigm for LLM optimization.
Abstract:Multilingual Alignment is an effective and representative paradigm to enhance LLMs' multilingual capabilities, which transfers the capabilities from the high-resource languages to the low-resource languages. Meanwhile, some researches on language-specific neurons reveal that there are language-specific neurons that are selectively activated in LLMs when processing different languages. This provides a new perspective to analyze and understand LLMs' mechanisms more specifically in multilingual scenarios. In this work, we propose a new finer-grained neuron identification algorithm, which detects language neurons~(including language-specific neurons and language-related neurons) and language-agnostic neurons. Furthermore, based on the distributional characteristics of different types of neurons, we divide the LLMs' internal process for multilingual inference into four parts: (1) multilingual understanding, (2) shared semantic space reasoning, (3) multilingual output space transformation, and (4) vocabulary space outputting. Additionally, we systematically analyze the models before and after alignment with a focus on different types of neurons. We also analyze the phenomenon of ''Spontaneous Multilingual Alignment''. Overall, our work conducts a comprehensive investigation based on different types of neurons, providing empirical results and valuable insights for better understanding multilingual alignment and multilingual capabilities of LLMs.
Abstract:Current large-language models (LLMs) typically adopt a fixed reasoning strategy, either simple or complex, for all questions, regardless of their difficulty. This neglect of variation in task and reasoning process complexity leads to an imbalance between performance and efficiency. Existing methods attempt to implement training-free fast-slow thinking system switching to handle problems of varying difficulty, but are limited by coarse-grained solution-level strategy adjustments. To address this issue, we propose a novel reasoning paradigm: Process-Level Adaptive Thinking Mode Switching (PATS), which enables LLMs to dynamically adjust their reasoning strategy based on the difficulty of each step, optimizing the balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. Our approach integrates Process Reward Models (PRMs) with Beam Search, incorporating progressive mode switching and bad-step penalty mechanisms. Experiments on diverse mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that our methodology achieves high accuracy while maintaining moderate token usage. This study emphasizes the significance of process-level, difficulty-aware reasoning strategy adaptation, offering valuable insights into efficient inference for LLMs.
Abstract:While current reasoning models possess strong exploratory capabilities, they are often criticized for overthinking due to redundant and unnecessary reflections. In this work, we reveal for the first time that overthinking in reasoning models may stem from their internal bias towards input texts. Upon encountering a reasoning problem, the model immediately forms a preliminary guess about the answer, which we term as an internal bias since it is not derived through actual reasoning. When this guess conflicts with its reasoning result, the model tends to engage in reflection, leading to the waste of computational resources. Through further interpretability experiments, we find that this behavior is largely driven by the model's excessive attention to the input section, which amplifies the influence of internal bias on its decision-making process. Additionally, by masking out the original input section, the affect of internal bias can be effectively alleviated and the reasoning length could be reduced by 31%-53% across different complex reasoning tasks. Notably, in most cases, this approach also leads to improvements in accuracy. These findings demonstrate a causal relationship between internal bias and overthinking.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks but remain vulnerable to meticulously crafted jailbreak attacks. In this paper, we identify a critical safety gap: while LLMs are adept at detecting jailbreak prompts, they often produce unsafe responses when directly processing these inputs. Inspired by this insight, we propose SAGE (Self-Aware Guard Enhancement), a training-free defense strategy designed to align LLMs' strong safety discrimination performance with their relatively weaker safety generation ability. SAGE consists of two core components: a Discriminative Analysis Module and a Discriminative Response Module, enhancing resilience against sophisticated jailbreak attempts through flexible safety discrimination instructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate SAGE's effectiveness and robustness across various open-source and closed-source LLMs of different sizes and architectures, achieving an average 99% defense success rate against numerous complex and covert jailbreak methods while maintaining helpfulness on general benchmarks. We further conduct mechanistic interpretability analysis through hidden states and attention distributions, revealing the underlying mechanisms of this detection-generation discrepancy. Our work thus contributes to developing future LLMs with coherent safety awareness and generation behavior. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/SAGE.