Multilingual Benchmark

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Period ending 2026-09-21

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Multilingual Benchmark.

Period ending 2026-09-14

5 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Multilingual Benchmark.

Period ending 2026-09-07

8 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Multilingual Benchmark.

120 papers

Latest in Multilingual Benchmark

Jun 6, 2026cs.CV

Sci-Rho: A Multilingual Visually-Grounded Symbolic Benchmark for STEM Problems

Symbolic benchmarks have emerged as a key approach to assess model robustness under minor modifications to STEM-related questions. However, existing symbolic benchmarks mostly remain limited to mathematical reasoning, lack visual grounding, and are predominantly in English. In this work, we introduce Sci-Rho (Science Rhobustness), a dynamic benchmark for visually-grounded STEM problems spanning five subjects and seven languages, comprising 4,242 problem templates (606 per language) crafted by domain experts, including Olympiad medalists. Each template is implemented as executable Python code that generates diverse but equivalent problem instances by varying numerical values, visual patterns, geometric shapes, color schemes, and function types, resulting in 42,420 instances in total, each paired with reasoning steps and ground-truth solutions. We evaluated 17 state-of-the-art VLMs and discovered a noticeable gap between worst-case accuracy (defined as the proportion of problem templates that a model answers correctly across every generated variation) and average accuracy. We also discovered that smaller models show noticeable performance degradation across languages, whereas proprietary and larger models remain robust. Step-level evaluation reflects this same trend, revealing a significant gap between average F1 and worst-case F1 scores. Finally, our inspection of attention heads of a VLM reveals substantial cross-lingual variation in the relative attention allocated to image tokens compared to text tokens. Our work highlights the importance of evaluation beyond static benchmarks as a metric to measure the quality of VLMs.
Muhammad Falensi Azmi, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Vallerie Alexandra Putra +3
Jun 5, 2026cs.CL

Beyond English benchmarks: clinical llm evaluation in Brazilian Portuguese

Large Language Models are transforming the support for clinical decision and their application in real scenarios. Yet, most benchmarks are conducted in English, and cross-lingual evaluation is needed to tackle the language gaps in global access. We introduce ClinicalBr, the first bilingual benchmark for clinical decision built from real Brazilian case reports. The corpus contains 2,892 cases drawn from 28 SciELO medical journals, spanning 18 specialties, and is structured as parallel Portuguese-English pairs. Each case supports four evaluation tasks: diagnosis retrieval, differential diagnosis, exam recommendation, and treatment planning. We evaluate four models: MedGemma-27B, Sabiá-4, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini, across both languages. The central finding is that the Portuguese-English performance gap is task-dependent, not general. In diagnosis retrieval, English yields a consistent advantage across all models, with +7.5-12.1 accuracy points. This advantage disappears in differential diagnosis, exam recommendation, and treatment planning, where confidence intervals cross zero for most models and Portuguese completeness scores are marginally higher. Brazilian-endemic conditions proved easier than the full corpus, not harder, indicating that tropical presentations are adequately represented in current pre-training. Exam recommendation was the hardest task across all models and both languages, with F1 scores below 0.10, well below the differential diagnosis ceiling of 0.20-0.27.
Giordano de Pinho Souza, Glaucia Melo, Josefino Cabral Melo Lima +1
Jun 5, 2026cs.CR

MLingualFC: Evaluating Jailbreak Vulnerabilities in Multilingual Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across multimodal tasks, yet their safety robustness remains an open challenge. While prior work has shown that structured visual prompts such as flowcharts can effectively jailbreak VLMs, existing studies are largely limited to English-centric settings. In this paper, we introduce MLingualFC, a multilingual multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate jailbreak vulnerabilities of VLMs across diverse languages using structured flowchart representations. MLingualFC encodes harmful instructions into flowchart images across five languages (Hindi, Punjabi, Spanish, Romanian, and German). We evaluate state-of-the-art multilingual VLMs, including Qwen2.5-VL, Gemma-4, and Pangea, under a black-box threat model. Our results reveal significant multilingual safety gaps. Flowchart-based attacks achieve high attack success rates (ASR) in case of Latin script languages, demonstrating that visual encoding of harmful content effectively bypasses safety alignment across languages. In contrast, non-Latin script languages such as Punjabi exhibit substantially lower ASR, suggesting potential limitations in visual text recognition rather than stronger safety alignment. These findings highlight that current VLM safety mechanisms fail to generalize across languages and modalities. Resources are available at https://github.com/Rishabhpm23/MLingualFC
Rishabh Makwana, Mamta, Deeksha Varshney +1
Jun 5, 2026cs.CL

mmPISA-bench: Do LLMs Reason Equally Well Across 43 Languages?

We introduce mmPISA-bench, a compact high-quality multilingual reasoning benchmark derived from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The benchmark consists of 25 multiple-choice questions that require reasoning in order to be answered correctly. Each question is provided in official human translations to 43 languages and complemented with machine-translated counterparts (i.e., 2,150 data points in total). We evaluate two mainstream proprietary LLMs across languages, reasoning effort levels, and translation types in terms of their ability to answer the questions correctly. Our results show that modern LLMs can reason effectively across all evaluated languages, achieve accuracy comparable to human test-takers, with some performance variations across covered languages. We further find that machine-translated questions do not degrade accuracy relative to official human translations which suggests that high-quality machine translation (synthetic data) might often be adequate for large-scale multilingual reasoning evaluations where official translations are not available. Finally, we analyze token usage and related inference cost and find that LLMs usage in some languages is simultaneously more expensive and less accurate.
Yerzhan Sapenov, Jaromir Savelka
Jun 5, 2026cs.CL

MADE: Beyond Scoring via a Multilingual Agentic Diagnosing Engine for Fine-Grained Evaluation Insights

Multilingual and multicultural benchmarks now cover dozens of languages and model families, but the resulting score landscapes remain metric-rich and insight-poor, necessitating fine-grained multilingual post-evaluation diagnosis. However, single LLMs and open-ended agents are easily swamped by the long, noisy diagnostic input, and no reusable taxonomy exists for it. To address this, we propose MADE, a Multilingual Agentic Diagnosing Engine that decomposes post-evaluation analysis into planning, aggregate analysis, instance-level case inspection, multilingual and cultural reflection, and grounded report synthesis. MADE is paired with an expert-led 54-query and 15-language diagnostic set, evaluated on top of a large-scale multilingual evaluation substrate (33 model families, 11 benchmarks, 26 languages, 34 cultures, 8.66M evaluation records). Experiments show that MADE outperforms the strongest shared baseline by 47% in diagnosis report quality and is preferred by human multilingual experts in 87.9% of pairwise comparisons. Applied with multilingual experts, MADE further surfaces four actionable findings on deployment, iteration, and cross-cultural pitfalls, turning benchmark score tables into model-selection and remediation guidance.
Yilun Liu, Miao Zhang, Shimin Tao +9
Jun 4, 2026cs.LG

HAARES Half-Split Residual Basis Routing for Deep Transformers

Block-level residual routing makes learned residual aggregation practical by routing over block summaries, but each summary compresses an ordered sequence of attention and MLP updates into one cumulative vector. We propose \method{}, a lightweight residual basis router that keeps the cumulative block source and adds one half-split detail basis, computed as the difference between first-half and second-half residual updates. The detail basis is RMS-matched and updated online, exposing coarse intra-block trajectory information without dense sublayer-level routing. Across OpenWebText, cross-domain character-level benchmarks, and BPE-tokenized OpenWebText, the empirical pattern is depth-dependent: gains are small or mixed at shallow depth and most reliable in 48-layer models. In the 201M 48-layer setting, \method{} improves over Block AttnRes across all three seeds, while a 453M two-seed probe shows the same direction. Ablations rule out source duplication, random signed details, fixed detail-source biases, or block-count changes alone. Cost analysis shows that the method is FLOP-light but not wall-clock-free: it adds memory and routing overhead, yet its relative arithmetic cost is amortized as width grows and earlier convergence can reduce time-to-target.
Kehan Wang
Jun 4, 2026cs.CV

Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench: A Bilingual Multimodal Benchmark for Cognitively Informed Evaluation of Vision-Language Models

Despite the rapid progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the field lacks benchmarks that rigorously diagnose their true reasoning abilities and chart meaningful progress toward human-like multimodal intelligence. Most existing evaluations focus on piecemeal or disconnected tasks, obscuring critical cognitive weaknesses and providing little insight for targeted improvement. To address this gap, we introduce BloomBench, part of the Almieyar benchmarking series, the first cognitively human-grounded, bilingual (English-Arabic) multimodal benchmark for VLMs. Grounded in Bloom's Taxonomy, BloomBench systematically evaluates six levels of cognition (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create) through carefully designed image-question-answer tasks. Built with a semi-automated pipeline and validated through a stratified hybrid quality assurance protocol, it ensures scalability, cultural inclusivity, and linguistic fidelity. Leveraging this framework, we conduct a comprehensive study of state-of-the-art VLMs to diagnose their cognitive profiles. Our analysis reveals a sharp cognitive asymmetry: while state-of-the-art models achieve strong performance ceilings in semantic understanding, they struggle substantially with factual recall and creative synthesis. This demonstrates that current general multimodal proficiency masks deeper limitations in specific cognitive layers. Furthermore, our study highlights a critical performance gap between Arabic and English, exposing limitations in current cross-lingual multimodal reasoning. These findings establish a foundation for developing more cognitively aligned and inclusive VLMs. The benchmark framework and dataset is available at: https://github.com/qcri/Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench.
Mohammad Mahdi Abootorabi, Omid Ghahroodi, Anas Madkoor +4
Jun 2, 2026cs.CV

SLU-2K: A Question-Based Benchmark for Semantic Evaluation of Sign Language Translation

Sign Language Translation (SLT) is typically evaluated with surface-form metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE, which reward lexical overlap but do not directly measure whether a translation preserves the meaning of the source sign sequence. This is in contrast with the final objective of integrating SLT in assistive technology. In this work, we shift the focus from Sign Language Translation (SLT) to Sign Language Understanding (SLU), with particular emphasis on semantic understanding. Specifically, we evaluate systems based on their ability to correctly recover, from the input video, key semantic aspects of the original sentence, such as actions taking place and facts about people and objects. To enable this evaluation systematically, we propose SLU-2K, a dataset of 2,350 closed-ended video question-answer pairs based on the popular PHOENIX-2014T and CSL-Daily datasets. To obtain SLU-2K, we propose and extensively evaluate an automated data generation pipeline which produces questions across 7 categories, namely actions, locations, numbers, objects, people, time, and weather conditions. We show the potential of SLU-2K by evaluating popular Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and two representative state-of-the-art systems, MMSTL and SpaMo. Our results show that MLLMs reach near-random performance, highlighting the need for a more systematic integration of SLU in current AI systems. Furthermore, state-of-the-art translation systems carefully fine-tuned on in-domain data still exhibit a substantial semantic gap, with results ranging from 56.7% to 75.2%. These findings suggest that current SLT evaluation protocols overestimate true understanding and that future progress should be measured not only by fluency and n-gram overlap, but also by semantic correctness. Code, prompts, and benchmark files are available at https://github.com/ZenoTsT/SLU-2K
Zeno Testa, Antonino Furnari, Lorenzo Baraldi +1
Jun 2, 2026cs.CL

Benchmarking Speech-to-Speech Translation Models

Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) has advanced rapidly, but offline evaluation lacks a unified protocol: studies report non-overlapping metric subsets, preventing direct comparisons. We introduce COMPASS, a unified and reproducible benchmarking framework integrating 46 metrics across eight dimensions, and deploy it on 1,248 model-language configurations from FLEURS and CVSS, spanning cascaded and end-to-end architectures over ten language pairs. Architectures exhibit complementary strengths: best-vs-worst gaps exceed 30% on naturalness and speaker preservation but remain within a few points on translation quality, so single-metric rankings systematically misrepresent system quality. Correlation filtering reduces 46 metrics to 10 per direction, with three axes requiring different metrics across X\toEN and EN\toX (e.g., TER/UTMOS vs. ChrF++/NISQA-MOS); these subsets preserve rankings (Spearman's ρ>0.80ρ>0.80) while cutting evaluation time by 2.5×\approx 2.5\times. Human validation across dubbing, podcasts, and medical domains shows standalone MOS predictors fail to predict listener preference, while top domain-specific metrics correlate with human judgment (ρ0.90ρ\geq 0.90). We release COMPASS as a foundation for domain-aware S2ST evaluation.
Alkis Koudounas, Hayato Futami, Quentin Jodelet +3
Jun 1, 2026eess.AS

SpeechEditBench: A Bilingual Multi-Attribute Benchmark for Instruction-Guided Speech Editing

Instruction-guided speech editing requires a model to modify specified speech attributes while preserving non-target characteristics. Despite rapid progress in Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs), systematic evaluation of this capability remains challenging, as existing benchmarks are fragmented across isolated editing tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce SpeechEditBench, a bilingual multi-attribute benchmark for instruction-guided speech editing. SpeechEditBench encompasses seven atomic editing tasks, as well as compositional editing tasks that integrate multiple operations within a single instruction. We propose an anchor-based evaluation protocol that separately assesses the edit success of target attributes and the preservation of non-target linguistic content, leading to three metrics: target success, preservation success, and joint success. Using this benchmark, we evaluate mainstream Speech LLMs and specialized speech editing systems. The results reveal three key findings: (1) no single model performs well across all editing dimensions; (2) closed-source Speech LLMs generally outperform open-source models; (3) compositional editing poses a significant challenge, with even the most advanced models struggling to achieve high joint success. SpeechEditBench provides a rigorous diagnostic framework to identify bottlenecks in Speech LLMs, thereby facilitating the development of next-generation models with more precise instruction-guided editing capabilities. Data and code are available at https://github.com/daxintan-cuhk/SpeechEditBench.
Hanlin Zhang, Daxin Tan, Dehua Tao +3
May 31, 2026cs.CV

ChartArena: Benchmarking Chart Parsing across Languages, Scenarios, and Formats

Charts are a primary medium for conveying quantitative and relational information, yet systematically evaluating chart parsing models remains difficult. Existing benchmarks focus on narrow chart types and leave diagrammatic structures such as flowcharts and mind maps largely unaddressed, while models produce outputs in incompatible formats, and datasets rarely include the printed or hand-drawn images encountered in practice. To address these issues, we introduce ChartArena, a comprehensive bilingual benchmark covering eight chart families spanning both numeric charts and diagrammatic structures, each evaluated across three visual scenarios: digital renderings, printed photos, and hand-drawn photos. The dataset is built via a human-agent collaborative annotation pipeline with multi-stage human verification to ensure annotation reliability. To enable fair cross-model comparison, we further design a format-agnostic evaluation protocol that maps heterogeneous outputs into two canonical semantic spaces, a normalized triple view and a directed graph view, and scores them with structure-aware metrics. Through extensive evaluation of 26 leading MLLMs, we observe three consistent findings: (i) frontier proprietary models such as Gemini 3.1 Pro lead overall, yet the strongest open-source systems are rapidly closing the gap; (ii) document parsing models handle numeric charts reasonably but fall sharply behind on diagrammatic structures; and (iii) expert chart parsers remain limited to narrow chart families. Across all models, radar charts and hand-drawn scenarios stay especially challenging. These findings show that ChartArena exposes clear capability gaps and provides a unified foundation for future progress. ChartArena is publicly available at https://github.com/pspdada/ChartArena.
Shangpin Peng, Gengluo Li, Xingyu Wan +10
May 31, 2026cs.CL

PolySpeech-100: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Speech Understanding Across 100+ Languages and Dialects

While End-to-End (E2E) Speech-Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs) are rapidly evolving, their evaluation methodologies remain limited to the era of simple transcription. Existing benchmarks suffer from three critical limitations: a pronounced bias towards high-resource languages, a focus on low-level recognition (ASR) rather than semantic reasoning, and a neglect of regional dialects. To bridge this gap, we introduce PolySpeech-100, a massive-scale benchmark designed to assess `native-level' speech comprehension across 110 linguistic variants. We employ a novel hybrid construction pipeline that augments gold-standard human recordings with instruction-driven synthetic speech, allowing us to cover 19 distinct Chinese dialects and over 80 low-resource languages. Extensive evaluation of 22 state-of-the-art models (including Gemini-3, GPT-Audio, and Qwen2.5-Omni) yields pivotal insights. First, we demonstrate that open-source E2E models outperform Cascade (ASR+LLM) systems on heavy dialects, proving that direct audio processing preserves critical paralinguistic cues and prosodic features (e.g., intonation, stress) that are often lost in standard transcription. Second, we reveal a significant performance gap: while commercial models maintain robustness, open-source models suffer catastrophic degradation on low-resource languages. Finally, counter-intuitively, we observe that under standard zero-shot settings, Chain-of-Thought prompting frequently degrades speech understanding performance for most evaluated models, revealing a potential modality alignment gap in current architectures. PolySpeech-100 establishes a rigorous standard for the next generation of inclusive, omni-capable Speech-LLMs. The data, demo, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/YoungSeng/PolySpeech-100.
Sicheng Yang, Shulan Ruan, Shiwei Wu +4
May 29, 2026cs.CL

Model-Based Quality Assessment for Massively Multilingual Parallel Data

Large-scale multilingual bitext often contains two distinct problems: non-parallel sentence pairs and low-quality translations. We decompose model-based assessment for such data into two independent components: parallelism assessment with multilingual embeddings and reference-free quality estimation (QE). For parallelism, we benchmark four embedding models on FLORES-200 and BOUQuET retrieval tasks, covering 6,654 source--target directions in our target language-pair inventory. For QE, we evaluate nine reference-free evaluators on professional FLORES-200 translations across 41,412 ordered source--target directions. Results show that no model is universally reliable across translation directions. Naive QE ensembles dilute strong model signals, while documented target-language coverage is strongly associated with higher QE scores. Overall, these findings suggest that multilingual parallel-data assessment is best approached as a direction-aware routing and calibration problem, where no single universal metric is expected to suffice across all languages.
Abdelaziz M. A. Ibrahim, Zihao Li, Jörg Tiedemann +1
May 29, 2026cs.CL

XLGoBench: Detecting cross-lingual skill gaps with algorithmic tasks

We introduce a set of synthetic algorithmic tasks to detect cross-lingual gaps in the abilities of large language models. Our benchmark is commensurate across languages, since it requires models to perform the same underlying task in different languages; scalable, since each task can be generated at varying levels of complexity allowing it to be adapted to models with different capabilities; quantifiable, since every task admits an objective notion of correctness; and transparent, since tasks are generated from simple templates that can be readily audited for translation errors. Because our benchmark focuses on algorithmic tasks, differential performance is a sufficient -- but not necessary -- indicator of cross-lingual gaps. Nevertheless, we show through extensive experiments that our benchmark exposes persistent cross-lingual gaps in multiple state-of-the-art models.
Purvam Jain, Preethi Jyothi, Vihari Piratla +1
May 28, 2026cs.CV

BullingerDB: A Dataset for Handwritten Text Recognition and Writer Retrieval

We present BullingerDB, a large-scale benchmark dataset for historical document analysis based on the correspondence of Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575). The corpus comprises 20,898 pages and 499,222 text lines written by 796 writers over six decades, featuring stylistic variation, multilingual content (mostly Latin and Early New High German) as well as meta-information such as writer identity and time. We evaluate BullingerDB on text recognition and writer retrieval. TrOCR, the best performing model, achieves a CER of 9.1%. For writer retrieval, we introduce a temporal nDCG metric to assess time-aware retrieval. While temporally coherent retrieval is achievable, mAP (78.3%) scores indicate challenges due to long-term stylistic variation. With BullingerDB, we aim to establish a new benchmark for multilingual historical text recognition and temporally-aware writer analysis.
Marco Peer, Anna-Scius Bertrand, Patricia Scheurer +1
May 28, 2026cs.SE

CodeGolf Bench: A Multi-Language Benchmark for Evaluating Concise Code Generation Capabilities of Large Language Models

This paper introduces Code Bench, a benchmark capable of evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) concise code generation abilities in 60 programming languages. Based on code golf, a recreational programming competition focused on minimal character or byte solutions, the benchmark provides a distinctive measure of LLMs ability to produce efficient, concise code. Unlike existing benchmarks limited by fixed problem sets and language coverage, CodeGolf Bench leverages the code.golf platform to provide new problems and live human performance baselines. Evaluation of nine LLMs on Python and C++ tasks demonstrates that reasoning models significantly outperform non-reasoning models, achieving best average percentile of 70.97%. This performance gap is particularly pronounced in C++, highlighting reasoning's importance for languages with strict syntax requirements. Non-reasoning models struggle more with efficiency optimization across both languages, with best percentiles significantly lower than reasoning counterparts. CodeGolf Bench offers a dynamic framework for evaluating LLM code generation capabilities against evolving human performance on code golf.
Vedant Padwal
May 27, 2026cs.CL

HardMTBench: Stress-Testing Chinese-English Translation on Knowledge-Intensive Domains

General-purpose machine translation benchmarks such as FLORES-200 have reached a saturation regime on Chinese-English pairs, where modern large language models cluster within a narrow band of high scores. Across 22 systems, FLORES-200 zh-en GEMBA scores fall in a 7.87-point range with a standard deviation of 2.29, which compresses the separation between systems on knowledge-intensive domains such as finance, healthcare, law, and science and technology. We introduce HardMTBench, a difficulty-aware diagnostic benchmark for bidirectional Chinese-English domain translation. HardMTBench covers 12 domains and contains 10,000 hand-curated source sentences with reference translations, packaged as 20,000 directional test items. A three-stage construction pipeline builds a domain-balanced candidate pool of 84{,}566 pairs, applies an LLM-based multi-signal judge over knowledge density, translation difficulty, terminology load and reference correctness, and assembles the final test set under a hardness fusion rule with per-domain quotas. Across 22 systems spanning general LLMs, commercial engines and specialised MT models, HardMTBench widens the cross-system GEMBA range by roughly a factor of two over FLORES-200, induces visible rank reorderings, and exposes domain-specific terminology and knowledge weaknesses that quality-only metrics tend to flatten. All data and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/jasonNLP/HardMTBench.
Zheng Li, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song +1
May 27, 2026cs.CL

IFMTBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multilingual Translation Instruction Following

Modern translation workflows demand more than semantic equivalence. Users routinely require models to preserve JSON or HTML schemas, honor curated glossaries, disambiguate with provided context, and match prescribed registers, often several at once. Conventional metrics such as BLEU and xCOMET capture semantic fidelity but provide little signal on constraint adherence, while general instruction following benchmarks ignore the cross-lingual nature of translation. We introduce \bench, a benchmark for multilingual translation instruction following covering seven languages, with 4,506 single-constraint and 2,838 multi-constraint items spanning six constraint dimensions and five compositional patterns with instructions issued in all seven languages. Constraints are split into a gating subset verified by deterministic checkers and a continuous subset scored by a rubric-based LLM judge, combined under a multiplicative rule that resists reward hacking. Evaluating 15 models reveals systematic gaps that prior protocols miss: Instruction following scales with size more sharply than translation quality, glossary and structured-format constraints dominate the difficulty gradient, and general instruction following rankings correlate only weakly with translation behavior. Our benchmark are available at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hy-MT2/tree/main/IFMTBench.
Mingrui Sun, Mao Zheng, Zheng Li +1
May 27, 2026cs.AI

MIRA: A Bilingual Benchmark for Medical Information Response Audit

Existing safety evaluations for large language models overlook whether responses preserve comparable medical information across different user phrasings of the same question. To address this, we introduce the Medical Information Response Audit (MIRA), a bilingual, controlled benchmark that assesses whether LLMs provide comparable medical information across user-side language, register, and health literacy signals. MIRA contains 4,320 prompts built from 60 medically reviewed, low-risk health questions. Across five mainstream LLMs, models answered all medical questions, but responses to low health-literacy signals consistently omitted more key information, provided fewer concrete next steps, and offered less support for independent judgment. We term this pattern Differential Information Dilution (DID). A comparison with 300 real-world health queries provides preliminary evidence of rank-order validity. A knowledge-guided mitigation prompt reduces information dilution for most models, with the largest reductions in underinformative simplification observed for Claude (~8%) and Qwen (~6%). Code and data are available at https://github.com/Rainxu09/MIRA.
Mengyu Xu, Qiaoxin Yang, Qianqian Wang +3
May 27, 2026cs.CL

KVoiceBench, KOpenAudioBench, and KMMAU: Agent-Driven Korean Speech Benchmarks for Evaluating SpeechLMs

Speech language models (SpeechLMs) have achieved substantial progress by extending large language models (LLMs) to the speech modality. However, SpeechLM evaluation remains heavily centered on English, limiting reliable assessment of multilingual speech capabilities. Straightforward benchmark transfer through ASR, translation, normalization, and TTS can corrupt language-specific instructions, answer constraints, and spoken forms; for audio understanding, transferring source-language audio also fails to preserve target-language speaker attributes, accents, and paralinguistic properties. To address these limitations, we propose two human-agent benchmark-construction frameworks: one transfers source-language SpokenQA benchmarks into target-language SpokenQA benchmarks, and the other converts target-language ASR corpora into audio understanding benchmarks using transcriptions and speaker metadata. Using these frameworks, we construct and publicly release three Korean speech benchmarks: KVoiceBench and KOpenAudioBench for Korean SpokenQA, and KMMAU for Korean audio understanding, comprising 12,345 samples in total. We evaluate eight recent SpeechLMs and find that English-Korean performance gaps vary substantially across models and task families, and that SpokenQA and audio understanding rankings diverge, revealing complementary weaknesses invisible to English-only evaluation.
Haechan Kim, Seungjun Chung, Inkyu Park +2
May 26, 2026cs.CV

METATR: A Multilingual, Evolving Benchmark for Automatic Text Recognition

Benchmarks that reflect the diversity and complexity of real-world documents are essential for accurately evaluating Automatic Text Recognition (ATR) systems, especially Vision-Large Language Models (vLLMs). Although recent models demonstrate impressive performance, they are often evaluated on datasets containing modern, printed texts mostly written in English, which limits their relevance to many practical applications. Therefore, selecting a model for a specific use case requires evaluating it on data that matches the target documents. This highlights the importance of representative benchmarks for real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce METATR (v1.0), a multilingual, evolving benchmark designed to evaluate ATR models across a wide range of documents, facilitating meaningful model comparison and selection. The benchmark was designed to maximize diversity by including documents from various public collections. These documents cover 29 languages and include texts with multiple scripts and layouts. Beyond the dataset itself, METATR defines a standardized prompting and normalization methodology and establishes a dynamic evaluation framework. This approach is intended to produce reproducible results while remaining extensible over time. We evaluated a wide range of state-of-the-art systems, including open-source models and closed-source models. Results are reported across various dimensions, including performance at the dataset and language levels, robustness to handwritten documents, and computational efficiency. Our findings show that, although proprietary models achieve the most consistent performance, substantial variability persists across scripts and layouts. Overall, METATR provides a multidimensional, practitioner-oriented framework for assessing multilingual ATR in real-world conditions and tracking progress as the field evolves.
Mélodie Boillet, Solène Tarride, Christopher Kermorvant
May 25, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Literal Translation: Evaluating Cultural Effectiveness in Social Media UGC

Social media platforms enable large-scale cross-lingual communication, but translating user-generated content (UGC) remains challenging due to its informal style, cultural references, and interaction-based expressions. While recent LLMs have improved translation quality, existing benchmarks and metrics often fail to capture whether translations convey intended meaning and cultural resonance in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce CULTURE-MT, a benchmark for social media translation that focuses on both CULtural Transmission and UGC-specific emotion REsonance. CULTURE-MT consists of 1,002 UGC notes across 14 domains, categorized into four types based on culture-loaded symbols and linguistic style features. We also construct UGC-oriented training data to fine-tune Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B as baselines. We propose cultural effectiveness as a new evaluation criterion, focusing on expression accuracy and cultural adaptability. Testing 15 models, including the baselines, we find that traditional metrics fail to capture cultural effectiveness. We also observe that cultural effectiveness on base LLMs correlates with model size. Our work provides a comprehensive evaluation system for UGC translation models and will offer an open evaluation platform to advance research in this area. We release the CULTURE-MT benchmark and provide an online leaderboard where submitted translation results can be evaluated by our trained JUDGER.
Linjuan Wu, Ruiqi Zhang, Xinze Lyu +7
May 24, 2026cs.CL

Quantifying the Impact of Translation Errors on Multilingual LLM Evaluation

Machine-translated benchmarks are widely used to assess the multilingual capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet translation errors in these benchmarks remain underexplored, raising concerns about the reliability and comparability of multilingual evaluation. We address two practical gaps: (i) how well automatic MQM-style error spans from LLM judges and a span-aware QE baseline (xCOMET-XXL) match expert human span annotations on benchmark translations, and (ii) how strongly translation errors (as opposed to source-side issues in the English original) explain accuracy drops on translated benchmarks. We find that span agreement is non-trivial on naturally occurring benchmark translations, and that target-side translation errors are consistently associated with measurable, percentage-point drops in translated accuracy even after controlling for English correctness and source-side anomalies.
Klaudia-Doris Thellmann, Bernhard Stadler, Michael Färber +1
May 18, 2026cs.CL

Benchmarking Commercial ASR Systems on Code-Switching Speech: Arabic, Persian, and German

Code-switching -- the natural alternation between two languages within a single utterance -- remains one of the most challenging and under-studied conditions for automatic speech recognition (ASR). We present a benchmark evaluating five commercial ASR providers across four language pairs: Egyptian Arabic--English, Saudi Arabic (Najdi/Hijazi)--English, Persian (Farsi)--English, and German--English, comprising 300 samples per pair selected by a two-stage pipeline combining heuristic filtering with a GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro ensemble scorer, reducing LLM costs by \approx91%. We evaluate on both WER and BERTScore, showing that while both metrics agree on the ordinal ranking of systems for all Arabic and Persian pairs (τ=1.0τ= 1.0), WER inflates the magnitude of quality gaps by approximately 3×\times by penalising semantically correct transliteration choices. ElevenLabs Scribe v2 achieves the lowest WER (13.2% overall) and leads on BERTScore (0.936 overall). Difficulty-stratified analysis reveals performance gaps masked by aggregate averages, and BERT embedding projections confirm semantic proximity between reference and hypothesis despite surface-level script differences. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Perle-ai/ASR_Code_Switch.
Sajjad Abdoli, Ghassan Al-Sumaidaee, Clayton W. Taylor +2
May 16, 2026cs.CL

PaliBench: A Multi-Reference Blueprint for Classical Language Translation Benchmarks

Digital humanities projects increasingly rely on machine translation and large language models to widen access to classical, religious, and otherwise under-translated textual traditions. Yet standard translation benchmarks are poorly suited to such materials: they typically compare a system output against a single reference translation, even though classical texts often support multiple faithful renderings that differ in terminology, register, and interpretation. This article introduces PaliBench, both a benchmark for Pali-to-English translation and a reusable method for constructing multi-reference translation benchmarks for classical languages. The Pali case study draws on passages from the Sutta Pitaka aligned with independent English translations by Bhikkhu Sujato, Bhikkhu Thanissaro, and Bhikkhu Bodhi. The workflow combines LLM-assisted alignment of independently segmented translations, automated verification against source files, passage-level quality filtering, deduplication of formulaic repetitions, and multi-metric evaluation against multiple human references. The resulting benchmark contains 1,700 passages spanning 8,389 segments and approximately 345,000 tokens. We use it to evaluate ten contemporary large language models with complementary metrics, finding strong cross-metric concordance in system rankings alongside substantial variation in reliability and semantic outlier rates. The broader contribution is methodological: PaliBench shows how existing scholarly translations can be transformed into evaluation infrastructure for interpretive textual traditions without treating any single translation as definitive. Although developed for Pali Buddhist texts, the approach could be portable to other classical corpora where sufficient independent reference translations exist.
Máté Metzger, Nadnapang Phophichit
May 15, 2026cs.CL

DetectRL-X: Towards Reliable Multilingual and Real-World LLM-Generated Text Detection

The effective detection and governance of Large Language Model (LLM) generated content has become increasingly critical due to the growing risk of misuse. Despite the impressive performance of existing detectors, their reliability and potential in multilingual, real-world scenarios remain largely underexplored. In this study, we introduce DetectRL-X, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate advanced detectors across 8 dimensions. The benchmark encompasses 8 languages commonly used in commercial contexts and collects human-written texts from 6 domains highly susceptible to LLM misuse. To better aligned with real-world applications, We create LLM-generated texts using 4 popular commercial LLMs, and include typical AI-assisted writing operations such as polishing, expanding, and condensing to capture authentic usage patterns. Furthermore, we develop a multilingual framework for paraphrasing and perturbation attacks to simulate diverse human modifications and writing noise, enabling stress testing of detectors across languages. Experimental results on DetectRL-X reveal the strengths and limitations of current state-of-the-art detectors when applied to diverse linguistic resources. We further analyze how domains, generators, attack strategies, text length, and refinement operations influence performance in different languages, underscoring DetectRL-X as an effective benchmark for strengthening multilingual and language-specific detectors.
Junchao Wu, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu +8
May 14, 2026cs.CV

StyleTextGen: Style-Conditioned Multilingual Scene Text Generation

Style-conditioned scene text generation faces unique challenges in extracting precise text styles from complex backgrounds and maintaining fine-grained style consistency across characters, especially for multilingual scripts. We propose StyleTextGen, a novel framework that learns to perceive and replicate visual text styles across different languages and writing systems. Our approach features three key contributions: First, we introduce a dual-branch style encoder dedicated to style modeling, yielding robust multilingual text style representations in complex real-world scenes. Second, we design a text style consistency loss that enhances style coherence and improves overall visual quality. Third, we develop a mask-guided inference strategy that ensures precise style alignment between generated and reference text. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we construct StyleText-CE, a bilingual scene text style benchmark covering both monolingual and cross-lingual settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StyleTextGen significantly outperforms existing methods in style consistency and cross-lingual generalization, establishing new state-of-the-art performance in multilingual style-conditioned text generation.
Zeyu Chen, Fangmin Zhao, Yan Shu +3
May 13, 2026cs.AI

PolitNuggets: Benchmarking Agentic Discovery of Long-Tail Political Facts

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) embedded in agentic frameworks have transformed information retrieval from static, long context question answering into open-ended exploration. Yet real world use requires models to discover and synthesize "long-tail" facts from dispersed sources, a capability that remains under-evaluated. We introduce PolitNuggets, a multilingual benchmark for agentic information synthesis via constructing political biographies for 400 global elites, covering over 10000 political facts. We standardize evaluation with an optimized multi agent system and propose FactNet, an evidence conditional protocol that scores discovery, fine-grained accuracy, and efficiency. Across models and settings, we find that current systems often struggle with fine-grained details, and vary substantially in efficiency. Finally, using benchmark diagnostics, we relate agent performance to underlying model capabilities, highlighting the importance of short-context extraction, multilingual robustness, and reliable tool use.
Yifei Zhu
May 10, 2026cs.SE

An Execution-Verified Multi-Language Benchmark for Code Semantic Reasoning

Evaluating whether large language models (LLMs) can recover execution-relevant program structure, rather than only produce code that passes tests, remains an open problem. Existing code benchmarks emphasize test-passing outputs, from standalone programming tasks (HumanEval, MBPP, LiveCodeBench) to repository repair (SWE-Bench); this is useful, but offers limited diagnostic signal about which program semantics a model can recover from source. We introduce TraceEval, to our knowledge the first execution-verified, multi-language benchmark for code semantic reasoning: recovering a program's runtime call structure from source code. Unlike prior call-graph benchmarks that rely on static-tool output or hand-annotated ground truth, every positive edge in TraceEval is mechanically witnessed by validation execution, eliminating annotator disagreement and label noise for observed behavior. TraceEval consists of (i) 10,583 real-world programs (2,129 test, 8,454 train) extracted from 1,600+ open-source repositories across Python, JavaScript, and Java via an LLM-assisted harness-generation pipeline with tracer validation; and (ii) a reproducible pipeline that converts any open-source repository into new verified benchmark instances. We evaluate 10 LLMs at zero-shot on the held-out test split. The strongest model, Claude-Opus-4.6, reaches an average F1 of 72.9% across the three languages. To demonstrate the train split's utility as a supervision substrate, we fine-tune the Qwen2.5-Coder family on it: lifts of up to +55.6 F1 bring tuned Qwen2.5-Coder-32B to 71.2%, within 1.7 F1 of zero-shot Claude-Opus-4.6. We release the benchmark, pipeline, baselines, and a datasheet at https://github.com/yikun-li/TraceEva
Yikun Li, Jinfeng Jiang, Ting Zhang +7
May 9, 2026cs.CL

EmoS: A High-Fidelity Multimodal Benchmark for Fine-grained Streaming Emotional Understanding

In the context of today's high-pressure, aging society, the demand for large-scale emotional models capable of providing empathetic support is more critical than ever. However, existing benchmarks fail to simultaneously achieve ecological validity, signal clarity, and reliable fine-grained labeling. We introduce EmoS, a high-fidelity bilingual benchmark designed to resolve the limitations of ecological validity and noise in existing datasets by combining strictly filtered static slices with a dynamic Streaming Monologue subset. Supported by a rigorous dual-layer human annotation pipeline, EmoS provides trusted ground truth that captures continuous emotional evolution. Empirical results show that fine-tuning MLLMs (multimodal large language models) on EmoS yields significant gains over zero-shot baselines, laying the foundation for the training and evaluation of future emotion recognition models and empathy models. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/EmoS.
Pengze Guo, Jingxi Liang, Zhiwen Xie +2
May 8, 2026cs.CL

The Translation Tax Is Not a Scalar: A Counterfactual Audit of English-Source Cue Inheritance in Chinese Multilingual Benchmarks

The Translation Tax is often treated as a scalar: translated benchmarks are assumed to inflate scores by preserving English-source cues. We audit this claim in an English-to-Chinese setting. Three proxy estimators disagree: back-translation gaps are small and parser-fragile; cue-score calibration does not predict item-level gains; and a six-model native-control comparison shows model-family rather than uniform benchmark effects. We add a same-item LLM-naturalization stress test that holds answer, options, and content fixed while rewriting Chinese surface form. After correcting a prompt-construction bug, this contrast no longer supports a model-family interaction, but it preserves a residue dose-response: high-residue items benefit while low-residue items do not. The result is not a single Translation Tax, but a set of estimator- and item-dependent validity risks. We release per-cell evidence, the naturalization protocol, human QC, and a reporting checklist for translated multilingual benchmark papers.
Zezheng Lin, Fengming Liu, Handi Li
May 7, 2026cs.LG

Delulu: A Verified Multi-Lingual Benchmark for Code Hallucination Detection in Fill-in-the-Middle Tasks

Large Language Models for code generation frequently produce hallucinations in Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) tasks -- plausible but incorrect completions such as invented API methods, invalid parameters, undefined variables, or non-existent imports. These failures pass superficial review yet introduce runtime errors. We introduce Delulu, a verified multi-lingual benchmark of 1,951 FIM samples across 7 languages and 4 hallucination types. Samples are curated through an adversarial pipeline: a frontier LLM generates plausible hallucinations, four diverse judge models evaluate them, embedding-based clustering mines progressively harder examples, self-contained Docker containers verify that golden completions compile while hallucinated variants produce the expected runtime error, and a final human-expert review removes any remaining biased or trivially decidable samples. We evaluate 11 open-weight FIM models from five families spanning 0.5B-32B parameters: a six-point Qwen2.5-Coder scaling slate, plus a cross-family slate (CodeLlama, DeepSeek-Coder-V2, StarCoder2). The strongest model reaches only 84.5% pass@1, no family exceeds 0.77 Edit Similarity, and every family produces hallucination-aligned completions on a non-trivial share of samples, confirming that the difficulty exposed by Delulu is task-intrinsic rather than family-specific. We release the benchmark, containers, and evaluation framework at https://github.com/microsoft/delulu.
Mahdi Erfanian, Nelson Daniel Troncoso, Aashna Garg +4
May 7, 2026cs.CL

Linear Semantic Segmentation for Low-Resource Spoken Dialects

Semantic segmentation is a core component of discourse analysis, yet existing models are primarily developed and evaluated on high-resource written text, limiting their effectiveness on low-resource spoken varieties. In particular, dialectal Arabic exhibits informal syntax, code-switching, and weakly marked discourse structure that challenge standard segmentation approaches. In this paper, we introduce a new multi-genre benchmark (more than 1000 samples) for semantic segmentation in conversational Arabic, focusing on dialectal discourse. The benchmark covers transcribed casual telephone conversations, code-switched podcasts, broadcast news, and expressive dialogue from novels, and was annotated and validated by native Arabic annotators. Using this benchmark, we show that segmentation models performing well on MSA news genres degrade on dialectal transcribed speech. We further propose a segmentation model that targets local semantic coherence and robustness to discourse discontinuities, consistently outperforming strong baselines on dialectal non-news genres. The benchmark and approach generalize to other low-resource spoken languages.
Kirill Chirkunov, Younes Samih, Abed Alhakim Freihat +1
May 5, 2026cs.CL

AfriVox-v2: A Domain-Verticalized Benchmark for In-the-Wild African Speech Recognition

Recent large language models (LLMs) show strong speech recognition and translation capabilities for high-resource languages. However, African languages remain dramatically underrepresented in benchmarks, limiting their practical use in low-resource settings. While early benchmarks tested African languages and accents, they lacked exhaustive real-world noise and granular domain evaluations. We present AfriVox-v2, a comprehensive benchmark designed to test speech models under realistic African deployment conditions. AfriVox-v2 introduces "in the wild" unscripted audio for all supported languages. We also introduce strict domain verticalization, evaluating model accuracy across ten sectors including government, finance, health, and agriculture and conducting targeted tests on numbers and named entities. Finally, we benchmark a new generation of speech models, including Sahara-v2, Gemini 3 Flash, and the Omnilingual CTC models. Our results expose the true generalization gap of modern speech models in specialized, noisy African contexts and provide a reliable blueprint for developers building localized voice AI.
Busayo Awobade, Gabrial Zencha Ashungafac, Tobi Olatunji
May 4, 2026cs.CV

MULTITEXTEDIT: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Degradation in Text-in-Image Editing

Text-in-image editing has become a key capability for visual content creation, yet existing benchmarks remain overwhelmingly English-centric and often conflate visual plausibility with semantic correctness. We introduce MULTITEXTEDIT, a controlled benchmark of 3,600 instances spanning 12 typologically diverse languages, 5 visual domains, and 7 editing operations. Language variants of each instance share a common visual base and are paired with a human-edited reference and region masks, isolating the language variable for cross-lingual comparison. To capture script-level errors that coarse text-matching metrics miss, such as missing diacritics, reversed RTL order, and mixed-script renderings, we introduce a language fidelity (LSF) metric scored by a two-stage LVM protocol that first traces the edited target text and then judges it in isolation, reaching a quadratic-weighted \k{appa} of 0.76 against native-speaker annotators. Evaluating 12 open-source and proprietary systems with LSF alongside standard semantic and mask-aware pixel metrics, we find pronounced cross-lingual degradation for every model, largest on Hebrew and Arabic and smallest on Dutch and Spanish, and concentrated in text accuracy and script fidelity rather than in coarse structural dimensions. We also uncover a pervasive semantic and pixel mismatch, where outputs preserve global layout and background fidelity yet distort script-specific forms.
Liwei Cheng, Shibo Feng, Lunjie Zhou +2
May 4, 2026cs.AI

AcademiClaw: When Students Set Challenges for AI Agents

Benchmarks within the OpenClaw ecosystem have thus far evaluated exclusively assistant-level tasks, leaving the academic-level capabilities of OpenClaw largely unexamined. We introduce AcademiClaw, a bilingual benchmark of 80 complex, long-horizon tasks sourced directly from university students' real academic workflows -- homework, research projects, competitions, and personal projects -- that they found current AI agents unable to solve effectively. Curated from 230 student-submitted candidates through rigorous expert review, the final task set spans 25+ professional domains, ranging from olympiad-level mathematics and linguistics problems to GPU-intensive reinforcement learning and full-stack system debugging, with 16 tasks requiring CUDA GPU execution. Each task executes in an isolated Docker sandbox and is scored on task completion by multi-dimensional rubrics combining six complementary techniques, with an independent five-category safety audit providing additional behavioral analysis. Experiments on six frontier models show that even the best achieves only a 55% pass rate. Further analysis uncovers sharp capability boundaries across task domains, divergent behavioral strategies among models, and a disconnect between token consumption and output quality, providing fine-grained diagnostic signals beyond what aggregate metrics reveal. We hope that AcademiClaw and its open-sourced data and code can serve as a useful resource for the OpenClaw community, driving progress toward agents that are more capable and versatile across the full breadth of real-world academic demands. All data and code are available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/AcademiClaw.
Junjie Yu, Pengrui Lu, Weiye Si +75
May 4, 2026cs.CL

SemEval-2026 Task 7: Everyday Knowledge Across Diverse Languages and Cultures

We present our shared task on evaluating the adaptability of LLMs and NLP systems across multiple languages and cultures. The task data consist of an extended version of our manually constructed BLEnD benchmark (Myung et al. 2024), covering more than 30 language-culture pairs, predominantly representing low-resource languages spoken across multiple continents. As the task is designed strictly for evaluation, participants were not permitted to use the data for training, fine-tuning, few-shot learning, or any other form of model modification. Our task includes two tracks: (a) Short-Answer Questions (SAQ) and (b) Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQ). Participants were required to predict labels and were allowed to submit any NLP system and adopt diverse modelling strategies, provided that the benchmark was used solely for evaluation. The task attracted more than 140 registered participants, and we received final submissions from 62 teams, along with 19 system description papers. We report the results and present an analysis of the best-performing systems and the most commonly adopted approaches. Furthermore, we discuss shared insights into open questions and challenges related to evaluation, misalignment, and methodological perspectives on model behaviour in low-resource languages and for under-represented cultures.
Nedjma Ousidhoum, Junho Myung, Carla Perez-Almendros +27
May 4, 2026cs.CL

Decoding-Time Debiasing via Process Reward Models: From Controlled Fill-in to Open-Ended Generation

Large language models pick up social biases from the data they are trained on and carry those biases into downstream applications, often reinforcing stereotypes around gender, race, religion, disability, age, and socioeconomic status. The standard fixes (retraining on curated data or fine-tuning with human feedback) are expensive, need access to model weights, and risk degrading the model on other tasks. In this paper we take a different route: we debias the model at decoding time, treating bias mitigation as a structured search over candidate tokens without ever touching model weights. A separate Process Reward Model (PRM) acts as a judge, scoring each candidate for both fairness and fluency. We design three schemes of increasing sophistication (Best-of-N selection, Sequential critique-and-revise, and Constitutional self-audit) and evaluate them on four models (GPT-4o-mini, Llama 3.2 3B, Gemma 3 4B, Qwen 2.5 3B) across a 200-prompt bilingual benchmark in English and Urdu covering eight bias categories. Sequential debiasing proves the most effective, raising mean bias scores by up to +0.40 over baseline while preserving (and sometimes improving) fluency. We then extend all three schemes to open-ended generation, where each token is debiased on the fly, and introduce a lightweight Bias Guard gate that fires only on potentially biased words, keeping overhead near 2x for well-calibrated models. A formal overhead metric that separates generator cost from judge cost reveals that Best-of-N is effectively free on the generator side in a native implementation. GPT-4o-mini, included as a strong proprietary anchor, confirms that the framework scales with model capability; the three open-weight models show where current small-scale LLMs still struggle.
Muneeb Ur Raheem Khan
Apr 30, 2026cs.CL

Cultural Benchmarking of LLMs in Standard and Dialectal Arabic Dialogues

There is a significant gap in evaluating cultural reasoning in LLMs using conversational datasets that capture culturally rich and dialectal contexts. Most Arabic benchmarks focus on short text snippets in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), overlooking the cultural nuances that naturally arise in dialogues. To address this gap, we introduce ArabCulture-Dialogue, a culturally grounded conversational dataset covering 13 Arabic-speaking countries, in both MSA and each country's respective dialect, spanning 12 daily-life topics and 54 fine-grained subtopics. We utilize the dataset to form three benchmarking tasks: (i) multiple-choice cultural reasoning, (ii) machine translation between MSA and dialects, and (iii) dialect-steering generation. Our experiments indicate that the performance gap between MSA and Arabic dialects still exists, whereby the models perform worse on all three tasks in the dialectal setup, compared to the MSA one.
Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar, Saeed Almheiri, Momina Ahsan +13
Apr 27, 2026cs.CL

GAIA-v2-LILT: Multilingual Adaptation of Agent Benchmark beyond Translation

Agent benchmarks remain largely English-centric, while their multilingual versions are often built with machine translation (MT) and limited post-editing. We argue that, for agentic tasks, this minimal workflow can easily break benchmark validity through query-answer misalignment or culturally off-target context. We propose a refined workflow for adapting English benchmarks into multiple languages with explicit functional alignment, cultural alignment, and difficulty calibration using both automated checks and human review. Using this workflow, we introduce GAIA-v2-LILT, a re-audited multilingual extension of GAIA covering five non-English languages. In experiments, our workflow improves agent success rates by up to 32.7% over minimally translated versions, bringing the closest audited setting to within 3.1% of English performance while substantial gaps remain in many other cases. This indicates that a substantial share of the multilingual performance gap is benchmark-induced measurement error, motivating task-level alignment when adapting English benchmarks across languages. The data is available as part of the MAPS package at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Fujitsu-FRE/MAPS/viewer/GAIA-v2-LILT. We also release the code used in our experiments at https://github.com/lilt/gaia-v2-lilt.
Yunsu Kim, Kaden Uhlig, Joern Wuebker
Apr 25, 2026cs.CL

IdiomX A Multilingual Benchmark for Idiom Understanding, Retrieval, and Interpretation

Idiomatic expressions remain a persistent challenge for natural language processing because their meanings are often non-compositional, context-dependent, and difficult to align across languages. Existing idiom resources are often limited in scale, contextual diversity, or multilingual coverage, restricting their utility for modern language models. We introduce IdiomX, a large-scale multilingual benchmark for idiom understanding, retrieval, and interpretation, constructed through a reproducible multi-stage pipeline combining lexical resource extraction, large-scale normalization, controlled large language model enrichment, and structured validation. The resulting dataset contains over 190K contextualized examples spanning 12K+ idioms, with aligned English, Arabic, and French semantic representations, idiomatic and literal usage labels, and rich linguistic metadata. Building on this resource, we define a unified four-task benchmark covering idiom detection, context-to-idiom retrieval, Arabic-to-English idiom retrieval, and idiom interpretation, extending evaluation from figurative recognition to semantic grounding and explainable meaning retrieval. Experiments show that contextual transformer models substantially improve idiom detection, while hybrid retrieval and reranking architectures significantly strengthen both monolingual and cross-lingual idiom retrieval. Results further demonstrate that idiom interpretation can be effectively modeled as a semantic retrieval task, introducing interpretability as a complementary benchmark dimension. Overall, IdiomX provides a scalable benchmark for studying idiomatic language as a progression from detection to retrieval and semantic interpretation, and offers a modular framework extensible to additional languages and figurative reasoning tasks
Ayman Ali Sharara
Apr 24, 2026cs.CL

CNSL-bench: Benchmarking the Sign Language Understanding Capabilities of MLLMs on Chinese National Sign Language

Sign language research has achieved significant progress due to the advances in large language models (LLMs). However, the intrinsic ability of LLMs to understand sign language, especially in multimodal contexts, remains underexplored. To address this limitation, we introduce CNSL-bench, the first comprehensive Chinese em{National Sign Language benchmark designed for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in sign language understanding. The proposed CNSL-bench is characterized by: 1) Authoritative grounding, as it is anchored to the officially standardized \textit{National Common Sign Language Dictionary, mitigating ambiguity from regional or non-canonical variants and ensuring consistent semantic definitions; 2) Multimodal coverage, providing aligned textual descriptions, illustrative images, and sign language videos; and 3) Articulatory diversity, supporting fine-grained analysis across key manual articulatory forms, including air-writing, finger-spelling, and the Chinese manual-alphabet. Using CNSL-bench, we extensively evaluate 21 open-source and proprietary up-to-date MLLMs. Our results reveal that, despite recent advances in multimodal modeling, current MLLMs remain substantially inferior to human performance, exhibiting systematic disparities across input modalities and manual articulatory forms. Additional diagnostic analyses suggest that several performance limitations persist beyond improvements in reasoning and that instruction-following robustness varies substantially across models.
Rui Zhao, Xuewen Zhong, Xiaoyun Zheng +2
Apr 22, 2026cs.IR

Multilingual and Domain-Agnostic Tip-of-the-Tongue Query Generation for Simulated Evaluation

Tip-of-the-Tongue (ToT) retrieval benchmarks have largely focused on English, limiting their applicability to multilingual information access. In this work, we construct multilingual ToT test collections for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English, using an LLM-based query simulation framework. We systematically study how prompt language and source document language affect the fidelity of simulated ToT queries, validating synthetic queries through system rank correlation against real user queries. Our results show that effective ToT simulation requires language-aware design choices: non-English language sources are generally important, while English Wikipedia can be beneficial when non-English sources provide insufficient information for query generation. Based on these findings, we release four ToT test collections with 5,000 queries per language across multiple domains. This work provides the first large-scale multilingual ToT benchmark and offers practical guidance for constructing realistic ToT datasets beyond English.
Xuhong He, To Eun Kim, Maik Fröbe +3
Apr 22, 2026cs.CL

The GaoYao Benchmark: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Multilingual and Multicultural Abilities of Large Language Models

Evaluating the multilingual and multicultural capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for their global utility. However, current benchmarks face three critical limitations: (1) fragmented evaluation dimensions that often neglect deep cultural nuances; (2) insufficient language coverage in subjective tasks relying on low-quality machine translation; and (3) shallow analysis that lacks diagnostic depth beyond simple rankings. To address these, we introduce GaoYao, a comprehensive benchmark with 182.3k samples, 26 languages and 51 nations/areas. First, GaoYao proposes a unified framework categorizing evaluation tasks into three cultural layers (General Multilingual, Cross-cultural, Monocultural) and nine cognitive sub-layers. Second, we achieve native-quality expansion by leveraging experts to rigorously localize subjective benchmarks into 19 languages and synthesizing cross-cultural test sets for 34 cultures, surpassing prior coverage by up to 111%. Third, we conduct an in-depth diagnostic analysis on 20+ flagship and compact LLMs. Our findings reveal significant geographical performance disparities and distinct gaps between tasks, offering a reliable map for future work. We release the benchmark (https://github.com/lunyiliu/GaoYao).
Yilun Liu, Chunguang Zhao, Mengyao Piao +14
Apr 21, 2026cs.IR

PulseBench-Tab: A Multilingual Benchmark for Table Extraction with Graph-Based Evaluation

We introduce PulseBench-Tab, an open multilingual benchmark for evaluating table extraction from document images. The benchmark comprises 1,820 human-annotated tables spanning 9 languages and 4 scripts (Latin, CJK, Arabic, Cyrillic), drawn from 380 real-world source documents including financial filings, government reports, and regulatory disclosures. Tables range from 2 to 1,183 cells, with 48.1% containing merged or spanning cells. Alongside the dataset, we propose T-LAG (Table Logical Adjacency Graph), a novel evaluation metric that models tables as directed graphs over cell adjacencies and computes structural and content fidelity in a single score via optimal bipartite matching. We evaluate 9 commercial and open-source table extraction systems across the benchmark and report per-language breakdowns. The full dataset, scoring code, and all provider outputs are publicly available.
Ritvik Pandey, Sid Manchkanti, Mohammed Wazir Adain +2
Apr 21, 2026cs.CL

Lost in Translation: Do LVLM Judges Generalize Across Languages?

Automatic evaluators such as reward models play a central role in the alignment and evaluation of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Despite their growing importance, these evaluators are almost exclusively assessed on English-centric benchmarks, leaving open the question of how well these evaluators generalize across languages. To answer this question, we introduce MM-JudgeBench, the first large-scale benchmark for multilingual and multimodal judge model evaluation, which includes over 60K pairwise preference instances spanning 25 typologically diverse languages. MM-JudgeBench integrates two complementary subsets: a general vision-language preference evaluation subset extending VL-RewardBench, and a chart-centric visual-text reasoning subset derived from OpenCQA, enabling systematic analysis of reward models (i.e., LVLM judges) across diverse settings. We additionally release a multilingual training set derived from MM-RewardBench, disjoint from our evaluation data, to support domain adaptation. By evaluating 22 LVLMs (15 open-source, 7 proprietary), we uncover substantial cross-lingual performance variance in our proposed benchmark. Our analysis further shows that model size and architecture are poor predictors of multilingual robustness, and that even state-of-the-art LVLM judges exhibit inconsistent behavior across languages. Together, these findings expose fundamental limitations of current reward modeling and underscore the necessity of multilingual, multimodal benchmarks for developing reliable automated evaluators.
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Mir Tafseer Nayeem +5
Apr 21, 2026cs.CL

CulturALL: Benchmarking Multilingual and Multicultural Competence of LLMs on Grounded Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) are now deployed worldwide, inspiring a surge of benchmarks that measure their multilingual and multicultural abilities. However, these benchmarks prioritize generic language understanding or superficial cultural trivia, leaving the evaluation of grounded tasks -- where models must reason within real-world, context-rich scenarios -- largely unaddressed. To fill this gap, we present CulturALL, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark to assess LLMs' multilingual and multicultural competence on grounded tasks. CulturALL is built via a human--AI collaborative framework: expert annotators ensure appropriate difficulty and factual accuracy, while LLMs lighten the manual workload. By incorporating diverse sources, CulturALL ensures comprehensive scenario coverage. Each item is carefully designed to present a high level of difficulty, making CulturALL challenging. CulturALL contains 2,610 samples in 14 languages from 51 regions, distributed across 16 topics to capture the full breadth of grounded tasks. Experiments show that the best LLM achieves 44.48% accuracy on CulturALL, underscoring substantial room for improvement.
Peiqin Lin, Chenyang Lyu, Wenjiang Luo +22
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

MORPHOGEN: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Gender-Aware Morphological Generation

While multilingual large language models (LLMs) perform well on high-level tasks like translation and question answering, their ability to handle grammatical gender and morphological agreement remains underexplored. In morphologically rich languages, gender influences verb conjugation, pronouns, and even first-person constructions with explicit and implicit mentions of gender. We introduce MORPHOGEN, a morphologically grounded large-scale benchmark dataset for evaluating gender-aware generation in three typologically diverse grammatically gendered languages: French, Arabic, and Hindi. The core task, GENFORM, requires models to rewrite a first-person sentence in the opposite gender while preserving its meaning and structure. We construct a high-quality synthetic dataset spanning these three languages and benchmark 15 popular multilingual LLMs (2B-70B) on their ability to perform this transformation. Our results reveal significant gaps and interesting insights into how current models handle morphological gender. MORPHOGEN provides a focused diagnostic lens for gender-aware language modeling and lays the groundwork for future research on inclusive and morphology-sensitive NLP.
Mehul Agarwal, Aditya Aggarwal, Arnav Goel +2
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for Machine Translation

Existing MT evaluation frameworks, including automatic metrics and human evaluation schemes such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), are largely language-agnostic. However, they often fail to capture dialect- and culture-specific errors in diglossic languages (e.g., Arabic), where translation failures stem from mismatches in language variety, content coverage, and pragmatic appropriateness rather than surface form alone.We introduce LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for MT. LQM is a hierarchical error taxonomy for diagnosing MT errors through six linguistically grounded levels: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics, morphosyntax, orthography, and graphetics (Figure 1). We construct a bidirectional parallel corpus of 3,850 sentences (550 per variety) spanning seven Arabic dialects (Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni), derived from conversational, culturally rich content. We evaluate six LLMs in a zero-shot setting and conduct expert span-level human annotation using LQM, producing 6,113 labeled error spans across 3,495 unique erroneous sentences, along with severity-weighted quality scores. We complement this analysis with an automatic metric (spBLEU). Though validated here on Arabic, LQM is a language-agnostic framework designed to be easily applied to or adapted for other languages. LQM annotated errors data, prompts, and annotation guidelines are publicly available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/LQM_MT.
Samar M. Magdy, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdellah El Mekki +2
Apr 20, 2026eess.AS

MINT-Bench: A Comprehensive Multilingual Benchmark for Instruction-Following Text-to-Speech

Instruction-following text-to-speech (TTS) has emerged as an important capability for controllable and expressive speech generation, yet its evaluation remains underdeveloped due to limited benchmark coverage, weak diagnostic granularity, and insufficient multilingual support. We present \textbf{MINT-Bench}, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark for instruction-following TTS. MINT-Bench is built upon a hierarchical multi-axis taxonomy, a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline, and a hierarchical hybrid evaluation protocol that jointly assesses content consistency, instruction following, and perceptual quality. Experiments across ten languages show that current systems remain far from solved: frontier commercial systems lead overall, while leading open-source models become highly competitive and can even outperform commercial counterparts in localized settings such as Chinese. The benchmark further reveals that harder compositional and paralinguistic controls remain major bottlenecks for current systems. We release MINT-Bench together with the data construction and evaluation toolkit to support future research on controllable, multilingual, and diagnostically grounded TTS evaluation. The leaderboard and demo are available at https://longwaytog0.github.io/MINT-Bench/
Huakang Chen, Jingbin Hu, Liumeng Xue +12
Apr 16, 2026cs.CL

XQ-MEval: A Dataset with Cross-lingual Parallel Quality for Benchmarking Translation Metrics

Automatic evaluation metrics are essential for building multilingual translation systems. The common practice of evaluating these systems is averaging metric scores across languages, yet this is suspicious since metrics may suffer from cross-lingual scoring bias, where translations of equal quality receive different scores across languages. This problem has not been systematically studied because no benchmark exists that provides parallel-quality instances across languages, and expert annotation is not realistic. In this work, we propose XQ-MEval, a semi-automatically built dataset covering nine translation directions, to benchmark translation metrics. Specifically, we inject MQM-defined errors into gold translations automatically, filter them by native speakers for reliability, and merge errors to generate pseudo translations with controllable quality. These pseudo translations are then paired with corresponding sources and references to form triplets used in assessing the qualities of translation metrics. Using XQ-MEval, our experiments on nine representative metrics reveal the inconsistency between averaging and human judgment and provide the first empirical evidence of cross-lingual scoring bias. Finally, we propose a normalization strategy derived from XQ-MEval that aligns score distributions across languages, improving the fairness and reliability of multilingual metric evaluation.
Jingxuan Liu, Zhi Qu, Jin Tei +3
Apr 7, 2026cs.CL

DIA-HARM: Dialectal Disparities in Harmful Content Detection Across 50 English Dialects

Harmful content detectors, particularly disinformation classifiers, are predominantly developed and evaluated on Standard American English (SAE), leaving their robustness to dialectal variation unexplored. We present DIA-HARM, the first benchmark for evaluating disinformation detection robustness across 50 English dialects spanning U.S., British, African, Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific varieties. Using Multi-VALUE's linguistically grounded transformations, we introduce D-CUBE (Dialectal Disinformation Detection Corpus), a core corpus component of DIA-HARM comprising 195K samples derived from established disinformation benchmarks. Our evaluation of 16 detection models reveals systematic vulnerabilities: human-written dialectal content degrades detection by 1.4-3.6% F1, while AI-generated content remains stable. Fine-tuned transformers substantially outperform zero-shot LLMs (96.6% vs. 78.3% best-case F1), with some models exhibiting catastrophic failures exceeding 33% degradation on mixed content. Cross-dialectal transfer analysis across 2,450 dialect pairs shows that multilingual models (mDeBERTa: 97.2% average F1) generalize effectively, while monolingual models like RoBERTa and XLM-RoBERTa fail on dialectal inputs. These findings demonstrate that current disinformation detectors may systematically disadvantage hundreds of millions of non-SAE speakers worldwide. We release the DIA-HARM benchmark, including the D-CUBE corpus (https://github.com/jsl5710/dia-harm), and evaluation tools (https://jsl5710.github.io/dia-harm).
Jason Lucas, Matt Murtagh, Ali Al-Lawati +3
Mar 30, 2026cs.CL

KoALa-Bench: Evaluating Large Audio Language Models on Korean Speech Understanding and Faithfulness

Recent advances in large audio language models (LALMs) have enabled multilingual speech understanding. However, benchmarks for evaluating LALMs remain scarce for non-English languages, with Korean being one such underexplored case. In this paper, we introduce KoALa-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating Korean speech understanding and speech faithfulness of LALMs. In particular, KoALa-Bench comprises six tasks. Four tasks evaluate fundamental speech understanding capabilities, including automatic speech recognition, speech translation, speech question answering, and speech instruction following, while the remaining two tasks evaluate speech faithfulness, motivated by our observation that several LALMs often fail to fully leverage the speech modality. Furthermore, to reflect Korea-specific knowledge, our benchmark incorporates listening questions from the Korean college scholastic ability test as well as content covering Korean cultural domains. We conduct extensive experiments across six models, including both white-box and black-box ones. Our benchmark, evaluation code, and leaderboard are publicly available at https://ksbench.github.io/Korean-Benchmark/.
Jinyoung Kim, Hyeongsoo Lim, Eunseo Seo +4
Mar 15, 2026cs.CL

PARSA-Bench: A Comprehensive Persian Audio-Language Model Benchmark

Persian poses unique audio understanding challenges through its classical poetry, traditional music, and pervasive code-switching, none of which is captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce \textbf{PARSA-Bench} (\textbf{P}ersian \textbf{A}udio \textbf{R}easoning and \textbf{S}peech \textbf{A}ssessment Benchmark), the first dedicated benchmark for evaluating LALMs on Persian language and culture. It covers 16 tasks, ten of them new, spanning speech understanding, paralinguistic analysis, and culturally grounded audio reasoning. Across most tasks, text-only baselines outperform their audio counterparts, so audio understanding rather than language knowledge remains the main limitation, and supplying the transcript alongside the audio lifts weak models to near their text-only level. The consistent exception is Persian poetry, where prosody carries information the written form cannot: audio beats text on both poetry tasks, and metre detection shows the first signs of being learnable only at the largest model scale. The dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/MohammadJRanjbar/PARSA-Bench
Mohammad Javad Ranjbar Kalahroodi, Mohammad Amini, Parmis Bathayan +2
Mar 6, 2026cs.SD

ML-ITW: A Multilingual in-the-wild Benchmark for Speech Deepfake Detection

Recent advances in speech synthesis and voice conversion have greatly improved the naturalness and authenticity of generated audio. Meanwhile, evolving encoding, compression, and transmission mechanisms on social media platforms further obscure deepfake artifacts. These factors complicate reliable detection in real-world environments, underscoring the need for representative evaluation benchmarks. To this end, we introduce ML-ITW (Multilingual In-The-Wild), a multilingual dataset covering 14 languages, seven major platforms, and 180 public figures, totaling 28.39 hours of audio. We evaluate three detection paradigms: end-to-end neural models, self-supervised feature-based (SSL) methods, and audio large language models (Audio LLMs). Experimental results reveal significant performance degradation across diverse languages and real-world acoustic conditions, highlighting the limited generalization ability of existing detectors in practical scenarios. The ML-ITW dataset is publicly available.
Daixian Li, Jun Xue, Zhuolin Yi +4
Jan 30, 2026cs.CL

Benchmarking Machine Translation on Chinese Social Media Texts

The prevalence of rapidly evolving slang, neologisms, and highly stylized expressions in informal user-generated text, particularly on Chinese social media, poses significant challenges for Machine Translation (MT) benchmarking. Specifically, we identify two primary obstacles: (1) data scarcity, as high-quality parallel data requires bilingual annotators familiar with platform-specific slang, and stylistic cues in both languages; and (2) metric limitations, where traditional evaluators like COMET often fail to capture stylistic fidelity and nonstandard expressions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce CSM-MTBench, a benchmark covering five Chinese-foreign language directions and consisting of two expert-curated subsets: Fun Posts, featuring context-rich, slang- and neologism-heavy content, and Social Snippets, emphasizing concise, emotion- and style- driven expressions. Furthermore, we propose tailored evaluation approaches for each subset: measuring the translation success rate of slang and neologisms in Fun Posts, while assessing tone and style preservation in Social Snippets via a hybrid of embedding-based metrics and LLM-as-a-judge. Experiments on over 20 models reveal substantial variation in how current MT systems handle semantic fidelity and informal, social-media-specific stylistic cues. CSM-MTBench thus serves as a rigorous testbed for advancing MT systems capable of mastering real-world Chinese social media texts.
Kaiyan Zhao, Zheyong Xie, Zhongtao Miao +3
Jan 12, 2026cs.IR

Loci Similes: A Benchmark for Extracting Intertextualities in Latin Literature

Tracing connections between historical texts is an important part of intertextual research, enabling scholars to reconstruct the virtual library of a writer and identify the sources influencing their creative process. These intertextual links manifest in diverse forms, ranging from direct verbatim quotations to subtle allusions and paraphrases disguised by morphological variation. Language models offer a promising path forward due to their capability of capturing semantic similarity beyond lexical overlap. However, the development of new methods for this task is held back by the scarcity of standardized benchmarks and easy-to-use datasets. We address this gap by introducing Loci Similes, a benchmark for Latin intertextuality detection comprising a curated dataset of ~176k text segments and 1,490 expert-verified parallels, including 945 labeled references from an existing dataset. Using this data, we establish baselines for retrieval and classification of intertextualities with both lexical methods and pretrained encoder language models.
Julian Schelb, Michael Wittweiler, Marie Revellio +2
Oct 6, 2025cs.CL

Camellia: Benchmarking Cultural Biases in LLMs for Asian Languages

As Large Language Models (LLMs) develop stronger multilingual capabilities, their sensitivity to culturally diverse entities becomes increasingly important. Prior work by Naous et al. (2024) has shown that LLMs often favor Western-associated entities in Arabic. Due to the lack of entity-centric multilingual benchmarks, it remains unclear if such biases also manifest in various non-Western languages. In this paper, we introduce Camellia, a benchmark for evaluating entity-centric cultural biases in nine Asian languages, spanning six Asian cultures. Camellia includes 19,530 manually annotated entities associated with the covered Asian or Western cultures, as well as 2,173 masked contexts for these entities derived from social media posts. Using Camellia, we evaluate cultural biases in four recent multilingual LLMs across three tasks: cultural context adaptation, sentiment association, and entity extractive QA. Our analyses show that LLMs struggle with cultural adaptation across these languages, with performance differing across models developed in different regions. We further observe that different LLM families can hold distinct biases, reflected in the ways they link cultures to particular sentiments. Lastly, we find that LLMs can struggle with context understanding in some Asian languages, creating performance gaps between cultures in entity extraction.
Tarek Naous, Anagha Savit, Carlos Rafael Catalan +17
Date pendingcs.CL

UrduMMLU: A Massive Multitask Benchmark for Urdu Language Understanding

Meaningful multilingual evaluation must test models in the target language and educational context. Urdu, spoken by more than 230 million people, lacks a broad MMLU-style benchmark built from native educational sources. We introduce UrduMMLU, a benchmark of 26,389 Urdu MCQs across 26 subjects and five domains, collected from native Urdu MCQ banks and public examination PDFs. Unlike translation-based benchmarks, UrduMMLU combines academic subjects with content specific to Urdu and regional education. We label the exam-derived portion through dual human annotation with strict consensus filtering. We evaluate 30 LLMs under English and Urdu prompts, yielding 60 zero-shot evaluations, and further evaluate four open-source LLMs under multiple few-shot settings across both prompt languages. Gemini-3.5-Flash performs best, reaching 90.23% and 90.45% accuracy, while no other model exceeds 85%. The strongest open-source model trails by 7.78 and 9.12 points, and many models lose 25 to 40 points on Urdu-centered Humanities subjects compared with STEM. Few-shot prompting yields only modest gains. Results on UrduMMLU show that current LLMs have uneven Urdu knowledge, particularly for content grounded in the regional context.
Ahmer Tabassum, Sarfraz Ahmad, Hasan Iqbal +3
Date pendingcs.CL

UrduFactCheck: An Agentic Fact-Checking Framework for Urdu with Evidence Boosting and Benchmarking

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised important concerns about the factual reliability of their outputs, particularly in low-resource languages such as Urdu. Existing automated fact-checking systems are predominantly developed for English, leaving a significant gap for the more than 200 million Urdu speakers worldwide. In this work, we present UrduFactBench and UrduFactQA, two novel hand-annotated benchmarks designed to enable fact-checking and factual consistency evaluation in Urdu. While UrduFactBench focuses on claim verification, UrduFactQA targets the factuality of LLMs in question answering. These resources, the first of their kind for Urdu, were developed through a multi-stage annotation process involving native Urdu speakers. To complement these benchmarks, we introduce UrduFactCheck, a modular fact-checking framework that incorporates both monolingual and translation-based evidence retrieval strategies to mitigate the scarcity of high-quality Urdu evidence. Leveraging these resources, we conduct an extensive evaluation of twelve LLMs and demonstrate that translation-augmented pipelines consistently enhance performance compared to monolingual ones. Our findings reveal persistent challenges for open-source LLMs in Urdu and underscore the importance of developing targeted resources. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/UrduFactCheck.
Sarfraz Ahmad, Hasan Iqbal, Momina Ahsan +6