KMMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Korean

Guijin Son, Hanwool Lee, Sungdong Kim, Seungone Kim, Niklas Muennighoff, Taekyoon Choi, Cheonbok Park, Kang Min Yoo, Stella Biderman


Abstract
We propose KMMLU, a Korean benchmark with 35,030 expert-level multiple-choice questions across 45 subjects ranging from humanities to STEM. While prior Korean evaluation tools heavily rely on translated versions of existing English benchmarks, KMMLU is collected from original Korean exams, thereby capturing linguistic and cultural aspects of the Korean language. Recent models struggle to show performance over 60%, significantly below the pass mark of the source exams (80%), highlighting the room for improvement. Notably, one-fifth of the questions in KMMLU require knowledge of Korean culture for accurate resolution. KMMLU thus provides a more accurate reflection of human preferences compared to translated versions of MMLU and offers deeper insights into LLMs’ shortcomings in Korean knowledge. The dataset and codes are made publicly available for future research.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.206
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4076–4104
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.206/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guijin Son, Hanwool Lee, Sungdong Kim, Seungone Kim, Niklas Muennighoff, Taekyoon Choi, Cheonbok Park, Kang Min Yoo, and Stella Biderman. 2025. KMMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Korean. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4076–4104, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
KMMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Korean (Son et al., NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.206.pdf