LiveCLKTBench: Towards Reliable Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual LLMs

Pei-Fu Guo, Yun-Da Tsai, Chun-Chia Hsu, Kai-Xin Chen, Ya An Tsai, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng, Mi-Yen Yeh, Shou-De Lin


Abstract
Evaluating cross-lingual knowledge transfer in large language models (LLMs) is challenging, as correct answers in a target language may arise either from genuine transfer or from prior exposure during pre-training. We present LiveCLKTBench, an automated generation pipeline specifically designed to isolate and measure cross-lingual knowledge transfer. Our pipeline identifies self-contained, time-sensitive knowledge entities from real-world domains, filters them based on temporal occurrence, and verifies them against the model’s knowledge. The documents of these valid entities are then used to generate factual questions, which are translated into multiple languages to evaluate transferability across linguistic boundaries. Using LiveCLKTBench, we evaluate several LLMs across five languages and observe that cross-lingual transfer is strongly influenced by linguistic distance and often asymmetric across language directions. While larger models improve transfer, the gains diminish with scale and vary across domains. These findings provide new insights into multilingual transfer and demonstrate the value of LiveCLKTBench as a reliable benchmark for future research.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.694
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15193–15208
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.694/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pei-Fu Guo, Yun-Da Tsai, Chun-Chia Hsu, Kai-Xin Chen, Ya An Tsai, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng, Mi-Yen Yeh, and Shou-De Lin. 2026. LiveCLKTBench: Towards Reliable Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual LLMs. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15193–15208, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LiveCLKTBench: Towards Reliable Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual LLMs (Guo et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.694.pdf
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