BenchMAX: A Comprehensive Multilingual Evaluation Suite for Large Language Models

Existing multilingual benchmarks focus primarily on language understanding tasks. There is a lack of benchmarks to measure comprehensive critical capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across diverse languages, including instruction following, reasoning, code generation, and long context understanding. To bridge this gap, we develop BenchMAX, a multiway multilingual benchmark that covers 10 diverse tasks, to evaluate LLMs' general abilities across many languages. To ensure high data quality, each sample is post-edited by three native annotators after machine-translating from English into 16 languages. Extensive experiments on BenchMAX reveal uneven utilization of core capabilities across languages, emphasizing the performance gaps that scaling model size alone does not resolve. BenchMAX serves as a comprehensive multilingual evaluation platform, providing a promising test bed to promote the development of multilingual language models. The dataset 1 and code 2 are publicly accessible.