Multilingual Verifier Bias in RLVR: Benchmark, Rollout Diagnosis, and the Cross-Lingual Selection Bottleneck

arXiv:2608.20362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a standard recipe for training large language models on mathematical reasoning, where an answer verifier serves as a language-neutral reward function. We show that this assumption fails in multilingual settings: an exact-match verifier turns format and script variation into language-dependent false-negative reward noise. We introduce a reusable protocol for auditing multilingual RLVR rewards: a verifier-robustness suite, a rollout-diagnosis procedure, and language-conditioned reward-error metrics for Japanese, English, and Chinese answers. On MGSM rollouts with k=8, the exact-match proxy rejects trusted-correct answers at sharply different rates by language across Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct; for Qwen3-8B, the false-negative rate reaches 0.642 on JP against 0.122 on EN and 0.073 on CN. A plain-numeric probe localizes the mechanism to the final-answer interface: an interface model drives reward-error VLB to zero while the residual accuracy gap is unchanged. We then expose a cross-lingual selection bottleneck: on MGSM250 rollouts, a target-local aggregation rule using no trusted labels closes 55-78% of the average selection gap, and over 95% of repairs require genuine cross-lingual support. The bottleneck replicates on a 483-problem MATH-500 set. A controlled training audit shows that rule-GRPO raises trusted accuracy while the reward-error VLB stays high. The unifying message is operational: multilingual RLVR rewards should be audited by language and by answer interface before they are optimized.

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Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-08-24