Global PIQA: Evaluating Physical Commonsense Reasoning Across 100+ Languages and Cultures
This addresses the problem of evaluating LLMs across diverse languages and cultures for researchers and developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmark concepts.
The authors tackled the lack of culturally-specific evaluation benchmarks for large language models by creating Global PIQA, a participatory commonsense reasoning benchmark covering over 100 languages and cultures, and found that state-of-the-art LLMs perform well overall but show up to a 37% accuracy gap in lower-resource languages.
To date, there exist almost no culturally-specific evaluation benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) that cover a large number of languages and cultures. In this paper, we present Global PIQA, a participatory commonsense reasoning benchmark for over 100 languages, constructed by hand by 335 researchers from 65 countries around the world. The 116 language varieties in Global PIQA cover five continents, 14 language families, and 23 writing systems. In the non-parallel split of Global PIQA, over 50% of examples reference local foods, customs, traditions, or other culturally-specific elements. We find that state-of-the-art LLMs perform well on Global PIQA in aggregate, but they exhibit weaker performance in lower-resource languages (up to a 37% accuracy gap, despite random chance at 50%). Open models generally perform worse than proprietary models. Global PIQA highlights that in many languages and cultures, everyday knowledge remains an area for improvement, alongside more widely-discussed capabilities such as complex reasoning and expert knowledge. Beyond its uses for LLM evaluation, we hope that Global PIQA provides a glimpse into the wide diversity of cultures in which human language is embedded.