MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization

Shuaijie She, Wei Zou, Shujian Huang, Wenhao Zhu, Xiang Liu, Xiang Geng, Jiajun Chen


Abstract
Intuitively, reasoning abilities are considered language-agnostic. However, existing LLMs exhibit inconsistent reasoning abilities across different languages, e.g., reasoning in the dominant language like English is superior to other languages due to the imbalance of multilingual training data. To enhance reasoning abilities in non-dominant languages, we propose a Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization framework (MAPO) to align the reasoning processes in other languages with the dominant language. Specifically, we harness an off-the-shelf translation model for the consistency between answers in non-dominant and dominant languages, which we adopt as the preference for optimization, e.g., Direct Preference Optimization(DPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Experiments show that MAPO stably achieves significant improvements in the multilingual reasoning of various models on all three benchmarks (MSVAMP +16.2%, MGSM +6.1%, and MNumGLUESub +13.3%), with improved reasoning consistency across languages. The project is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/MAPO.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.539
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10015–10027
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.539
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuaijie She, Wei Zou, Shujian Huang, Wenhao Zhu, Xiang Liu, Xiang Geng, and Jiajun Chen. 2024. MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10015–10027, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization (She et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.539.pdf