Beyond English-Centric Training: How Reinforcement Learning Improves Cross-Lingual Reasoning in LLMs

Abstract: Enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of LLMs attracts widespread attention. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown superior performance for improving complex reasoning, its impact on cross-lingual generalization compared to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) remains unexplored. We present the first systematic investigation into cross-lingual reasoning generalization of RL and SFT. Using Qwen2.5-3B-Base as our foundation model, we conduct experiments on diverse multilingual reasoning benchmarks, including math reasoning, commonsense reasoning, and scientific reasoning. Our investigation yields two significant findings: (1) Tuning with RL not only achieves higher accuracy but also demonstrates substantially stronger cross-lingual generalization capabilities compared to SFT. (2) RL training on non-English data yields better overall performance and generalization than training on English data, which is not observed with SFT. Furthermore, through comprehensive mechanistic analyses, we explore the underlying factors of RL's superiority and generalization across languages. Our results provide compelling evidence that RL enables the model with more robust reasoning strategies, offering crucial guidance for more equitable and effective multilingual reasoning.