English-Like Is Not the Same as Correct: Measuring Multilingual Reasoning Quality
TL;DR for operators A multilingual reasoning system may generate several plausible traces for the same request. The difficult part is deciding which trace to reward, trust, or return. The evidence here argues against using one English-derived trace-quality score as that decision rule. Across ten languages, many reasoning features are associated with correctness in broadly similar directions, but their effect sizes vary substantially and sometimes reverse. English semantic and structural similarity are generally positive signals, so the paper does not show that English-like reasoning is harmful. It shows that English similarity is not consistently the strongest signal. ...