Victor Ojewale
2026
Multi-lingual Functional Evaluation for Large Language Models
Victor Ojewale | Inioluwa Deborah Raji | Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Victor Ojewale | Inioluwa Deborah Raji | Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Multi-lingual competence in large language models is often evaluated via static data benchmarks such as Belebele, M-MMLU and M-GSM. However, these evaluations often fail to provide an adequate understanding of the practical performance and robustness of models across multi-lingual settings. In response, we create multi-lingual functional benchmarks – Cross-Lingual Grade School Math Symbolic (CL-GSM Symbolic) and Cross-Lingual Instruction-Following Eval (CL-IFEval)– by translating existing functional benchmark templates from English to five additional languages that span the range of resources available for NLP: French, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic and Yoruba. Our results show that the gap between static and functional evaluations is highly uneven: across models, performance drops from M-GSM to CL-GSM Symbolic by 24%, 17%, and 18% in English, French, and Spanish, while the drop from Belebele to CL-IFEval ranges from 15% to 24% across languages, and the drop from M-MMLU to CL-IFEval is much smaller (0.5% to 3%).Similarly, we find that model robustness across languages varies significantly, with certain languages (eg. Arabic, English) being the most consistently well performing across evaluation iterations.