@inproceedings{shomali-etal-2026-llm,
title = "{LLM} Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?",
author = "Shomali, Behzad and
Victor, Luisa and
Selbach, Tim and
Bashir, Ali Hamza and
Berghaus, David and
Koehler, Joachim and
Ali, Mehdi and
Frey, Markus",
editor = "T.Y.S.S., Santosh and
Rodriguez, Juan Diego and
de Gibert, Ona",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics ({ACL} 2026)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-srw.107/",
pages = "1212--1235",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-393-7",
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 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."
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<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 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.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T LLM Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?
%A Shomali, Behzad
%A Victor, Luisa
%A Selbach, Tim
%A Bashir, Ali Hamza
%A Berghaus, David
%A Koehler, Joachim
%A Ali, Mehdi
%A Frey, Markus
%Y T.Y.S.S., Santosh
%Y Rodriguez, Juan Diego
%Y de Gibert, Ona
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-393-7
%F shomali-etal-2026-llm
%X 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.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-srw.107/
%P 1212-1235
Markdown (Informal)
[LLM Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-srw.107/) (Shomali et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Behzad Shomali, Luisa Victor, Tim Selbach, Ali Hamza Bashir, David Berghaus, Joachim Koehler, Mehdi Ali, and Markus Frey. 2026. LLM Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), pages 1212–1235, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.