More Capable, Less Faithful: A Multilingual Analysis of Mathematical (Un)Solvability Detection in LLMs
TL;DR
The first multilingual benchmark of paired solvable and unsolvable mathematical problems, extending ReliableMath to French and Greek, finds that Solvability Belief is encoded as a largely universal, language-agnostic feature, and that higher-resource languages, despite achieving stronger mathematical reasoning performance, exhibit lower solvability-detection faithfulness.
Abstract
Solvability detection is one of the most challenging aspects of mathematical reasoning for Large Language Models (LLMs). While prior work has studied this capability extensively, these analyses have been limited to English. Consequently, it remains unclear whether multilingual failures arise from differences in internal Solvability Belief or from language-dependent failures to express it. To address this gap, we introduce the first multilingual benchmark of paired solvable and unsolvable mathematical problems, extending ReliableMath to French and Greek. Using this, we train multilingual probes predicting Solvability Belief and analyze the solvability detection capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs behaviorally, representationally, and in terms of faithfulness. We find that Solvability Belief is encoded as a largely universal, language-agnostic feature, and that higher-resource languages such as English, despite achieving stronger mathematical reasoning performance, exhibit lower solvability-detection faithfulness.
