Linguistic Generalizability of Test-Time Scaling in Mathematical
  Reasoning
Authors: name: Guijin Son; name: Jiwoo Hong; name: Hyunwoo Ko; name: James Thorne
Published: 2025-02-24 18:36:15

Abstract: Scaling pre-training compute has proven effective for achieving
mulitlinguality, but does the same hold for test-time scaling? In this work, we
introduce MCLM, a multilingual math benchmark featuring competition-level
problems in 55 languages. We test three test-time scaling methods-Outcome
Reward Modeling (ORM), Process Reward Modeling (ORM), and Budget Forcing
(BF)-on both Qwen2.5-1.5B Math and MR1-1.5B, a multilingual LLM we trained for
extended reasoning. Our experiments show that using Qwen2.5-1.5B Math with ORM
achieves a score of 35.8 on MCLM, while BF on MR1-1.5B attains 35.2. Although
"thinking LLMs" have recently garnered significant attention, we find that
their performance is comparable to traditional scaling methods like best-of-N
once constrained to similar levels of inference FLOPs. Moreover, while BF
yields a 20-point improvement on English AIME, it provides only a 1.94-point
average gain across other languages-a pattern consistent across the other
test-time scaling methods we studied-higlighting that test-time scaling may not
generalize as effectively to multilingual tasks. To foster further research, we
release MCLM, MR1-1.5B, and evaluation results.