One ruler to measure them all: Benchmarking multilingual long-context language models

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Kim, Yekyung, Russell, Jenna, Karpinska, Marzena, Iyyer, Mohit
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866908567625269248
author Kim, Yekyung
Russell, Jenna
Karpinska, Marzena
Iyyer, Mohit
author_facet Kim, Yekyung
Russell, Jenna
Karpinska, Marzena
Iyyer, Mohit
contents We present ONERULER, a multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate long-context language models across 26 languages. ONERULER adapts the English-only RULER benchmark (Hsieh et al., 2024) by including seven synthetic tasks that test both retrieval and aggregation, including new variations of the "needle-in-a-haystack" task that allow for the possibility of a nonexistent needle. We create ONERULER through a two-step process, first writing English instructions for each task and then collaborating with native speakers to translate them into 25 additional languages. Experiments with both open-weight and closed LLMs reveal a widening performance gap between low- and high-resource languages as context length increases from 8K to 128K tokens. Surprisingly, English is not the top-performing language on long-context tasks (ranked 6th out of 26), with Polish emerging as the top language. Our experiments also show that many LLMs (particularly OpenAI's o3-mini-high) incorrectly predict the absence of an answer, even in high-resource languages. Finally, in cross-lingual scenarios where instructions and context appear in different languages, performance can fluctuate by up to 20% depending on the instruction language. We hope the release of ONERULER will facilitate future research into improving multilingual and cross-lingual long-context training pipelines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_01996
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle One ruler to measure them all: Benchmarking multilingual long-context language models
Kim, Yekyung
Russell, Jenna
Karpinska, Marzena
Iyyer, Mohit
Computation and Language
We present ONERULER, a multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate long-context language models across 26 languages. ONERULER adapts the English-only RULER benchmark (Hsieh et al., 2024) by including seven synthetic tasks that test both retrieval and aggregation, including new variations of the "needle-in-a-haystack" task that allow for the possibility of a nonexistent needle. We create ONERULER through a two-step process, first writing English instructions for each task and then collaborating with native speakers to translate them into 25 additional languages. Experiments with both open-weight and closed LLMs reveal a widening performance gap between low- and high-resource languages as context length increases from 8K to 128K tokens. Surprisingly, English is not the top-performing language on long-context tasks (ranked 6th out of 26), with Polish emerging as the top language. Our experiments also show that many LLMs (particularly OpenAI's o3-mini-high) incorrectly predict the absence of an answer, even in high-resource languages. Finally, in cross-lingual scenarios where instructions and context appear in different languages, performance can fluctuate by up to 20% depending on the instruction language. We hope the release of ONERULER will facilitate future research into improving multilingual and cross-lingual long-context training pipelines.
title One ruler to measure them all: Benchmarking multilingual long-context language models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01996