Show Your Work in Swahili: Reinforcement Learning for Native-Language Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2611.16104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Fikiria, a two-stage SFT+GRPO recipe for Swahili mathematical reasoning. Its reward multiplies a format gate by a weighted sum of answer accuracy and the ChrF\texttt{++} similarity of the Swahili reasoning to an in-language reference chain of thought, so that training targets the surface fidelity of the reasoning trace and not only the final answer. We train on a 2.3k-problem Swahili dataset created by translating GSM8K with GPT-4.1 and filtering with SSA-COMET. On AfriMGSM Swahili, Fikiria-AfriqueQwen-14B reaches 79.2\%. Under the same fixed prompt and strict answer-format scoring, GPT-4o reaches 68.0\%, partly because it often fails the required answer format; IrokoBench reports 78.8\% for GPT-4o using a best-per-model prompt, a figure numerically close to ours but not directly comparable. In a small human evaluation with co-author annotators, GPT-4o's outputs were preferred overall. ChrF\texttt{++} measures surface fidelity, not the validity of individual reasoning steps.