From Unverifiable Domain Text to Cross-Lingual RLVR via Code-Switched Task Synthesis

arXiv:2610.25399 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-10-18 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-10-18

Updated: 2026-10-18

Comments: Accepted in EMNLP2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The gist: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) can improve reasoning in large language models, but specialized non-English domains expose a data mismatch.

Terminology

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) can improve reasoning in large language models, but specialized non-English domains expose a data mismatch. Raw English domain text is often available, while target-language RLVR tasks with verifiable rewards are scarce. We introduce code-switched task synthesis for cross-lingual RLVR, a data-centric approach that derives target-language and code-switched RLVR task variants from otherwise unverifiable English domain text. Using fill-in-the-middle multiple-choice QA as a seed task format, we synthesize automatically verifiable tasks from domain passages and reshape them into cross-lingual variants. These variants preserve the same evidence-answer relation but change how English and target-language evidence are presented during RLVR. On Korean medical benchmarks and cybersecurity benchmarks across four target languages, code-switched training outperforms matched monolingual and bilingual-mixture baselines on average target-language performance while maintaining comparable English performance. Additional analyses provide evidence of better target-language input understanding and stronger cross-lingual alignment in both model outputs and internal representations. These results suggest that code-switched training helps target-language inputs access domain reasoning learned more strongly in English.

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