# MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12528 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12528/

## Key facts

- Cited by 293 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 100 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Show Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00114/) (2021)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [How multilingual is Multilingual BERT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01502/) (2019)
- [On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11856/) (2019)
- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03057/) (2022)
- [TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05002/) (2020)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 293)

- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07827/) (2024)
- [MMAU: A Massive Multi-Task Audio Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19168/) (2024)
- [Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10588/) (2024)
- [Leak, Cheat, Repeat: Data Contamination and Evaluation Malpractices in Closed-Source LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03927/) (2024)
- [Language Model Tokenizers Introduce Unfairness Between Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15425/) (2023)
- [Do All Languages Cost the Same? Tokenization in the Era of Commercial Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13707/) (2023)
- [MADLAD-400: A Multilingual And Document-Level Large Audited Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04662/) (2023)
- [Quantifying the Persona Effect in LLM Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10811/) (2024)
- [Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07004/) (2023)
- [Having Beer after Prayer? Measuring Cultural Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14456/) (2023)
- [Understanding Catastrophic Forgetting in Language Models via Implicit Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10105/) (2023)
- [AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16020/) (2024)
- [A Systematic Study and Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Benchmark Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18486/) (2023)
- [Continual Pre-Training for Cross-Lingual LLM Adaptation: Enhancing Japanese Language Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17790/) (2024)
- [M3Exam: A Multilingual, Multimodal, Multilevel Benchmark for Examining Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05179/) (2023)
- [SeaLLMs -- Large Language Models for Southeast Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00738/) (2023)
- [Cross-lingual Prompting: Improving Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14799/) (2023)
- [SeaEval for Multilingual Foundation Models: From Cross-Lingual Alignment to Cultural Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04766/) (2023)
- [Do Multilingual Language Models Think Better in English?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01223/) (2023)
- [Are Large Language Model-based Evaluators the Solution to Scaling Up Multilingual Evaluation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07462/) (2023)
- [INCLUDE: Evaluating Multilingual Language Understanding with Regional Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19799/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14542/) (2023)
- [BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14857/) (2023)
- [CLIcK: A Benchmark Dataset of Cultural and Linguistic Intelligence in Korean](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06412/) (2024)
- [PolyLM: An Open Source Polyglot Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06018/) (2023)
- [MEGAVERSE: Benchmarking Large Language Models Across Languages, Modalities, Models and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07463/) (2023)
- [IndicGenBench: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Generation Capabilities of LLMs on Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16816/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative AI models have shown impressive performance on many Natural Language Processing tasks such as language understanding, reasoning, and language generation. An important question being asked by the AI community today is about the capabilities and limits of these models, and it is clear that evaluating generative AI is very challenging. Most studies on generative LLMs have been restricted to English and it is unclear how capable these models are at understanding and generating text in other languages. We present the first comprehensive benchmarking of generative LLMs - MEGA, which evaluates models on standard NLP benchmarks, covering 16 NLP datasets across 70 typologically diverse languages. We compare the performance of generative LLMs including Chat-GPT and GPT-4 to State of the Art (SOTA) non-autoregressive models on these tasks to determine how well generative models perform compared to the previous generation of LLMs. We present a thorough analysis of the performance of models across languages and tasks and discuss challenges in improving the performance of generative LLMs on low-resource languages. We create a framework for evaluating generative LLMs in the multilingual setting and provide directions for future progress in the field.
