MuBench: Assessment of Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models Across 61 Languages

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Authors: Wenhan Han, Yifan Zhang, Zhixun Chen, Binbin Liu, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Meng Fang, Yin Zheng
Cited by: 1

Abstract

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are advancing rapidly, with new models frequently claiming support for an increasing number of languages.However, existing evaluation datasets are limited and lack cross-lingual alignment, leaving assessments of multilingual capabilities fragmented in both language and skill coverage.To address this, we introduce MUBENCH, a benchmark covering 61 languages with 3.9M samples and evaluating a broad range of capabilities.We evaluate several state-of-the-art multilingual LLMs and find notable gaps between claimed and actual language coverage, particularly a persistent performance disparity between English and lowresource languages.Leveraging MUBENCH's alignment, we propose Multilingual Consistency (MLC) as a complementary metric to accuracy for analyzing performance bottlenecks and guiding model improvement.MUBENCH provides flexible evaluation formats, including mixed-language testing.Experimental results show that increasing model size does not improve its ability to handle mixed-language contexts.We recruited human experts to evaluate translation quality and cultural sensitivity for 34k samples across 17 languages, and combined these assessments with an LLM-asa-Judge approach to ensure overall data quality in low resource languages.Our data is open at https://github.com/aialt/MuBench.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Natural Language Processing Techniques Topic Modeling

Publication details

Journal / source
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Pages
16163–16192
Publication date
1 January 2026
Language
EN