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Main Authors: Carneiro, Sarah Almeida, Xypolopoulos, Christos, Fei, Xiao, Zhang, Yang, Vazirgiannis, Michalis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01995
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author Carneiro, Sarah Almeida
Xypolopoulos, Christos
Fei, Xiao
Zhang, Yang
Vazirgiannis, Michalis
author_facet Carneiro, Sarah Almeida
Xypolopoulos, Christos
Fei, Xiao
Zhang, Yang
Vazirgiannis, Michalis
contents We introduce CARTE 1 (Culturally Anchored Regional-Territorial Evaluation), a multiplechoice benchmark for evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform fine-grained reasoning over geographically grounded and regionally differentiated knowledge within France. While prior benchmarks focus on national-level cultural understanding, they largely overlook intra-country variation and the need to distinguish between closely related regional contexts. CARTE addresses this gap by introducing 2,431 questions spanning the 13 metropolitan regions of France and covering 14 thematic domains, including culture, language, demographics, economy, environment, and mobility. We further introduce CARTE-LV, a subset targeting Linguistic Variation across French regions, enabling focused evaluation of language-related differences. We evaluate 27 LLMs ranging from 1B to 12B parameters under few-shot settings. Our experiments reveal performance disparities across regions and model scales, suggesting systematic gaps in pretraining coverage and limited robustness to intra-national variation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_01995
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CARTE: A Benchmark for Mapping Language Model Knowledge Across France
Carneiro, Sarah Almeida
Xypolopoulos, Christos
Fei, Xiao
Zhang, Yang
Vazirgiannis, Michalis
Computation and Language
We introduce CARTE 1 (Culturally Anchored Regional-Territorial Evaluation), a multiplechoice benchmark for evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform fine-grained reasoning over geographically grounded and regionally differentiated knowledge within France. While prior benchmarks focus on national-level cultural understanding, they largely overlook intra-country variation and the need to distinguish between closely related regional contexts. CARTE addresses this gap by introducing 2,431 questions spanning the 13 metropolitan regions of France and covering 14 thematic domains, including culture, language, demographics, economy, environment, and mobility. We further introduce CARTE-LV, a subset targeting Linguistic Variation across French regions, enabling focused evaluation of language-related differences. We evaluate 27 LLMs ranging from 1B to 12B parameters under few-shot settings. Our experiments reveal performance disparities across regions and model scales, suggesting systematic gaps in pretraining coverage and limited robustness to intra-national variation.
title CARTE: A Benchmark for Mapping Language Model Knowledge Across France
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01995