BenchMAX: A Comprehensive Multilingual Evaluation Suite for Large
  Language Models
Authors: name: Xu Huang; name: Wenhao Zhu; name: Hanxu Hu; name: Conghui He; name: Lei Li; name: Shujian Huang; name: Fei Yuan
Published: 2025-02-11 08:17:19

Abstract: Previous multilingual benchmarks focus primarily on simple understanding
tasks, but for large language models(LLMs), we emphasize proficiency in
instruction following, reasoning, long context understanding, code generation,
and so on. However, measuring these advanced capabilities across languages is
underexplored. To address the disparity, we introduce BenchMAX, a multi-way
multilingual evaluation benchmark that allows for fair comparisons of these
important abilities across languages. To maintain high quality, three distinct
native-speaking annotators independently annotate each sample within all tasks
after the data was machine-translated from English into 16 other languages.
Additionally, we present a novel translation challenge stemming from dataset
construction. Extensive experiments on BenchMAX reveal varying effectiveness of
core capabilities across languages, highlighting performance gaps that cannot
be bridged by simply scaling up model size. BenchMAX serves as a comprehensive
multilingual evaluation platform, providing a promising test bed to promote the
development of multilingual language models. The dataset and code are publicly
accessible.