Gained in Translation: Privileged Pairwise Judges Enhance Multilingual Reasoning
Paper · 2026 · Lintang Sutawika, Gokul Swamy, Steven Wu et al.
Summary
Reasoning LLMs trained mostly on English chains of thought perform much worse when the same questions are posed in less-represented languages. Fixing this is difficult because target-language data is scarce and sparse answer-level rewards give RL little to learn from. The authors propose SP3F (Self-Play with Privileged Pairwise Feedback), which needs only English question–reference pairs.
SP3F has two stages:
- SFT stage: Qwen2.5-7B is fine-tuned on machine-translated versions of the English pairs.
- RL stage (GRPO): Verifiable rewards are combined with feedback from an LLM judge. The judge sees the English reference and decides which of two candidate responses matches it more closely. Each response's reward is its average win rate against the other samples, a self-play design that tolerates the judge's intransitive preferences.
Trained on data covering 18 languages, the resulting SP3F-7B beats Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct in both accuracy and language fidelity. It does so on in-domain math tasks and on out-of-domain non-math tasks, using roughly one eighth of the post-training data. It also generalizes better to unseen languages. The work shows a data-efficient route to multilingual reasoning that reuses English supervision.
Key points
- Data efficiency: SP3F-7B used about 125K training samples, compared with about 1M for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct.
- Benchmarks: Evaluation covers MGSM and MT Math100 (math) plus Belebele and Global MMLU Lite (non-math). Both accuracy and language fidelity are reported.
- Reward design: The reward sums four terms:
- binary answer correctness;
- binary
\boxed{}formatting; - binary language fidelity, set to 1 when at least 70% of the response is classified as the target language (a binary signal discourages reward hacking with very short replies);
- the pairwise win rate from the privileged judge.
- Effect of privileged information: Giving the judge the English reference makes its preferences less intransitive. It also helps the judge spot sound reasoning chains even when the final answer is wrong. A judge without this privilege still prefers models trained with the privileged judge over models it trained itself.
- Resources and gaps: Code is at github.com/lintangsutawika/sp3f, with artifacts in the Hugging Face collection neulab/sp3f. Improvements are smallest for some low-resource languages, such as Swahili and Telugu.
Institutions
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works
🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Reasoning · 1,426 worksMultilingual & cross-lingual NLP · 828 works
Cite
Cite as Lintang Sutawika, Gokul Swamy, Steven Wu and Graham Neubig. 2026. Gained in Translation: Privileged Pairwise Judges Enhance Multilingual Reasoning. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
@inproceedings{sutawika2026gained,
title = {{Gained in Translation: Privileged Pairwise Judges Enhance Multilingual Reasoning}},
author = {Lintang Sutawika, Gokul Swamy, Steven Wu and Graham Neubig},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.393},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.393}
}References
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