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Main Authors: M, Abhinav P, Saxena, Ojasva, C, Oswald, Krishnamurthy, Parameswari
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00960
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author M, Abhinav P
Saxena, Ojasva
C, Oswald
Krishnamurthy, Parameswari
author_facet M, Abhinav P
Saxena, Ojasva
C, Oswald
Krishnamurthy, Parameswari
contents The extent to which large language models (LLMs) can perform culturally grounded reasoning across non-English languages remains underexplored. This paper examines the reasoning and self-assessment abilities of LLMs across seven major Indian languages-Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. We introduce a multilingual riddle dataset combining traditional riddles with context-reconstructed variants and evaluate five LLMs-Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Mistral-Saba, LLaMA 4 Scout, and LLaMA 4 Maverick-under seven prompting strategies. In the first stage, we assess riddle-solving performance and find that while Gemini 2.5 Pro performs best overall, few-shot methods yield only marginal gains, and accuracy varies notably across languages. In the second stage, we conduct a self-evaluation experiment to measure reasoning consistency. The results reveal a key finding: a model's initial accuracy is inversely correlated with its ability to identify its own mistakes. Top-performing models such as Gemini 2.5 Pro are overconfident (4.34% True Negative Rate), whereas lower-performing models like LLaMA 4 Scout are substantially more self-aware (42.09% True Negative Rate). These results point to clear gaps in multilingual reasoning and highlight the need for models that not only reason effectively but also recognize their own limitations.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Riddle of Reflection: Evaluating Reasoning and Self-Awareness in Multilingual LLMs using Indian Riddles
M, Abhinav P
Saxena, Ojasva
C, Oswald
Krishnamurthy, Parameswari
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The extent to which large language models (LLMs) can perform culturally grounded reasoning across non-English languages remains underexplored. This paper examines the reasoning and self-assessment abilities of LLMs across seven major Indian languages-Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. We introduce a multilingual riddle dataset combining traditional riddles with context-reconstructed variants and evaluate five LLMs-Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Mistral-Saba, LLaMA 4 Scout, and LLaMA 4 Maverick-under seven prompting strategies. In the first stage, we assess riddle-solving performance and find that while Gemini 2.5 Pro performs best overall, few-shot methods yield only marginal gains, and accuracy varies notably across languages. In the second stage, we conduct a self-evaluation experiment to measure reasoning consistency. The results reveal a key finding: a model's initial accuracy is inversely correlated with its ability to identify its own mistakes. Top-performing models such as Gemini 2.5 Pro are overconfident (4.34% True Negative Rate), whereas lower-performing models like LLaMA 4 Scout are substantially more self-aware (42.09% True Negative Rate). These results point to clear gaps in multilingual reasoning and highlight the need for models that not only reason effectively but also recognize their own limitations.
title The Riddle of Reflection: Evaluating Reasoning and Self-Awareness in Multilingual LLMs using Indian Riddles
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00960