Can LLMs Solve My Grandma's Riddle? Evaluating Multilingual Large Language Models on Reasoning Traditional Bangla Tricky RiddlesNurul Labib Sayeedi, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Khushnur Binte Jahangir et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) show impressive performance on many NLP benchmarks, yet their ability to reason in figurative, culturally grounded, and low-resource settings remains underexplored. We address this gap for Bangla by introducing BanglaRiddleEval, a benchmark of 1,244 traditional Bangla riddles instantiated across four tasks (4,976 riddle-task artifacts in total). Using an LLM-based pipeline, we generate Chain-of-Thought explanations, semantically coherent distractors, and fine-grained ambiguity annotations, and evaluate a diverse suite of open-source and closed-source models under different prompting strategies. Models achieve moderate semantic overlap on generative QA but low correctness, MCQ accuracy peaks at only about 56% versus an 83% human baseline, and ambiguity resolution ranges from roughly 26% to 68%, with high-quality explanations confined to the strongest models. These results show that current LLMs capture some cues needed for Bangla riddle reasoning but remain far from human-level performance, establishing BanglaRiddleEval as a challenging new benchmark for low-resource figurative reasoning. All data, code, and evaluation scripts are available on GitHub: https://github.com/Labib1610/BanglaRiddleEval.
5.4CLMay 24
MultiHaluDet: Multilingual Hallucination Detection via LLM Hidden State ProbingRiasad Alvi, Nurul Labib Sayeedi, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi
Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a critical barrier to their reliable deployment, a vulnerability heavily exacerbated in non-English and resource-constrained contexts. Existing detection approaches that rely on output confidence heuristics or single-layer internal representations frequently fail to capture deep, complex factual inconsistencies across diverse languages. To address this, we introduce MultiHaluDet, a novel three-stage stacking framework that detects multilingual hallucinations by probing the full hidden state trajectories of frozen LLMs without requiring language-specific fine-tuning. Our method extracts sequential features across multiple layers and processes them via a hybrid architecture using multi-scale attention and self-attention pooling. By generating out-of-fold embeddings that feed into a calibrated classical classifier ensemble, MultiHaluDet captures both fine-grained and coarse-grained patterns of factual inconsistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art detection performance, reaching up to 98.55% AUROC on the English HaluEval and TriviaQA benchmarks using Mistral-7B and LLaMA2-7B architectures. Crucially, we rigorously evaluate our framework's cross-lingual generalization across high (French), medium (Bangla), and low-resource (Amharic) languages. MultiHaluDet demonstrates exceptional representational robustness, consistently outperforming baselines and successfully transferring hallucination detection capabilities across typologically diverse linguistic tiers.