PolyFact: Comparing Consistency-Driven Post-training Methods for Cross-Lingual Factual Recall

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) trained predominantly on English data encode substantial world knowledge, yet often fail to express it reliably in other languages, a phenomenon known as cross-lingual factual inconsistency. To study this, we introduce PolyFact, a fully parallel multilingual factual QA dataset of 60K Wikidata-grounded facts across 12 typologically diverse languages, and propose consistency-driven GRPO with cross-lingual reward pooling. We compare our method against supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and the consistency-enhancement baselines DCO and CM-Align on OLMo-2-1124-7B and Qwen-2.5-7B, and analyze whether light continual pretraining (CPT) on parallel data provides a useful foundation for post-training. No single method dominates: SFT maximises in-distribution accuracy but not consistency, DCO yields the strongest consistency gains but fails to transfer to free-form generation, and our GRPO variant achieves the strongest transfer to free-form recall and unseen languages on the multilingual base model. CPT mildly aids monolingual models but harms multilingual ones. Mechanistic analyses suggest that GRPO is associated with reduced language specialization, consistent with greater sharing of representations across languages. We release our code, models, and dataset publicly.