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One ruler to measure them all: Benchmarking multilingual long-context LLMs (arxiv.org)
2 points by danielam 341 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A test set turns seven long-text tasks into 26 languages to check how well language models find and combine information, including a fact that may not exist. As the text grows from 8,000 to 128,000 tokens, the gap between common and rare languages widens.

Abstract · One ruler to measure them all: Benchmarking multilingual long-context language models

We present ONERULER, a multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate long-context language models across 26 languages. ONERULER adapts the English-only RULER benchmark (Hsieh et al., 2024) by including seven synthetic tasks that test both retrieval and aggregation, including new variations of the "needle-in-a-haystack" task that allow for the possibility of a nonexistent needle. We create ONERULER through a two-step process, first writing English instructions for each task and then collaborating with native speakers to translate them into 25 additional languages. Experiments with both open-weight and closed LLMs reveal a widening performance gap between low- and high-resource languages as context length increases from 8K to 128K tokens. Surprisingly, English is not the top-performing language on long-context tasks (ranked 6th out of 26), with Polish emerging as the top language. Our experiments also show that many LLMs (particularly OpenAI's o3-mini-high) incorrectly predict the absence of an answer, even in high-resource languages. Finally, in cross-lingual scenarios where instructions and context appear in different languages, performance can fluctuate by up to 20% depending on the instruction language. We hope the release of ONERULER will facilitate future research into improving multilingual and cross-lingual long-context training pipelines.

Yekyung Kim, Jenna Russell, Marzena Karpinska, Mohit Iyyer
arXiv:2503.01996 · cs.CL · submitted Mar 3, 2025 · updated Sep 30, 2025
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