Mahongxia


2026

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.
Cultural taboo safety is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs), as culturally insensitive outputs may cause offense or even social harm. However, existing cultural benchmarks primarily assess cultural knowledge or values biases, while overlooking whether LLMs can recognize and respect cultural taboos, especially when taboos are implicitly hidden in seemingly harmless questions. Besides, cultural taboos are implicit, and context-dependent, thus poss unique challenges for reliable evaluation. To address these gaps, we introduce **CulShield**, the first public benchmark dedicated to evaluating and improving the cultural taboo safety of LLMs. CulShield spans 77 countries and regions, and includes over 2,020 taboos. It evaluates models along both explicit knowledge and implicit behaviors.Experiments on several advanced LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-2.5-pro) reveal a clear "knowledge-behavior gap": models often fail to apply known taboos during interaction. We further show that variations in linguistic context can significantly affect LLMs’ cultural taboo safety. Code and data is accessible here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CulShield-7A0E.