Towards Reliable Evaluation of Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal E-Commerce Applications
This work addresses the problem for e-commerce practitioners by providing a more robust benchmark, though it is incremental as it builds on existing evaluation frameworks.
The authors tackled the lack of reliable evaluation tools for large language models in e-commerce by introducing EcomEval, a comprehensive multilingual and multimodal benchmark covering 37 tasks across six categories, including 8 multimodal tasks, sourced from real customer data and spanning seven languages, with results showing improved assessment of models on complex, real-world shopping scenarios.
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel on general-purpose NLP benchmarks, yet their capabilities in specialized domains remain underexplored. In e-commerce, existing evaluations-such as EcomInstruct, ChineseEcomQA, eCeLLM, and Shopping MMLU-suffer from limited task diversity (e.g., lacking product guidance and after-sales issues), limited task modalities (e.g., absence of multimodal data), synthetic or curated data, and a narrow focus on English and Chinese, leaving practitioners without reliable tools to assess models on complex, real-world shopping scenarios. We introduce EcomEval, a comprehensive multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in e-commerce. EcomEval covers six categories and 37 tasks (including 8 multimodal tasks), sourced primarily from authentic customer queries and transaction logs, reflecting the noisy and heterogeneous nature of real business interactions. To ensure both quality and scalability of reference answers, we adopt a semi-automatic pipeline in which large models draft candidate responses subsequently reviewed and modified by over 50 expert annotators with strong e-commerce and multilingual expertise. We define difficulty levels for each question and task category by averaging evaluation scores across models with different sizes and capabilities, enabling challenge-oriented and fine-grained assessment. EcomEval also spans seven languages-including five low-resource Southeast Asian languages-offering a multilingual perspective absent from prior work.