LoFTI: Localization and Factuality Transfer to Indian Locales

Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of world knowledge acquired via training on large web-scale datasets crawled from the internet. However, the datasets used to train the LLMs typically exhibit a geographical bias towards English-speaking Western countries. This results in LLMs producing biased or hallucinated responses to queries that require answers localized to other geographical regions. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark named LOFTI (Localization and Factuality Transfer to Indian Locales) that can be used to evaluate an LLM's contextual localization and factual text transfer capabilities. LOFTI consists of factual statements about entities in source and target locations; the source locations are spread across the globe and the target locations are all within India with varying degrees of hyperlocality (country, states, cities). The entities span a wide variety of categories. We use LOFTI to evaluate Mixtral, Llama3.3-70B, GPT-4 and two other Mixtral-based approaches well-suited to the task of localized factual transfer. We demonstrate that LOFTI is a high-quality evaluation benchmark and all the models, including GPT-4, produce skewed results across varying levels of hyperlocality.