It is found that large language models are strong on knowledge-intensive topics such as history, geography, and mathematics, but substantially weaker on everyday popular-culture topics such as celebrities, music, movies, and news.
Abstract
Quiz rooms, trivia nights, and quiz shows challenge human knowledge across a wide range of topics, from canonical facts to everyday culture. In this paper, we examine whether large language models (LLMs) can perform competitively in such settings, using quiz-style questions to test them on both common and niche topics. We introduce TriviaRoomQA, a multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate everyday, culturally grounded, and long-tail knowledge across 288 topics. The benchmark contains 3,300 parallel multiple-choice questions in six European languages and additional 5,340 French-only questions for a more fine-grained case study. We evaluate 30 open-weight LLMs from European, Asian, and North American providers, covering models from 7 to 70B parameters. We find that models are strong on knowledge-intensive topics such as history, geography, and mathematics, but substantially weaker on everyday popular-culture topics such as celebrities, music, movies, and news. Moreover, model performance varies across languages even for the same underlying questions, suggesting that access to factual knowledge is not always language-independent. In sum, our dataset and experiments demonstrate an important knowledge gap which is not captured by existing academic-based saturated benchmarks.
Cultural evaluation of large language models (LLMs) often focuses on high-resource standard languages, leaving regional culture and dialect communities underrepresented. We introduce BavGround, a benchmark for evaluating Bavarian regional cultural grounding and dialect competence across English, German and Bavarian. BavGround contains 206 multiple-choice source questions across eight cultural domains per language, yielding 618 multi-parallel instances, with items covering both broadly accessible cultural knowledge and source-grounded regional knowledge from journalism, historical sources, and specialist literature. We evaluate fifteen 7B-10B open-weight instruction-tuned models and one closed-model reference. Strong multilingual models perform best overall, but performance drops on Bavarian items and source-grounded questions, indicating persistent difficulty with dialectal and localized cultural knowledge. We further show that conclusions depend strongly on evaluation protocol: raw answer-letter scoring, shuffled-letter scoring, option-text likelihood, generated-answer parsing, and semantic matching can produce different absolute scores and rankings, especially for regionally adapted models. Finally, an exploratory analysis of GENBA-10B checkpoints suggests that continued pretraining improves answer-content likelihood unevenly across domains, while dialect competence remains comparatively weak. BavGround supports localized, protocol-aware evaluation of cultural representation in LLMs.
Jophin John, Michael Hoffmann, Jan Fillies et al.· 0 citations
This work investigates continued pre-training for adapting large language models to Swedish journalism, using a high-quality dataset that is curate from millions of news articles and demonstrates the importance of targeted evaluation in the adaptation process.
Lukas Borggren, Jenny Kunz, Marco Kuhlmann· 0 citations
BEAR-Bench (Bilingual Enterprise and Academic Reasoning), a self-contained, complex English-and-Russian benchmark comprising 1000 human-annotated questions based on text-rich business and scientific documents, is introduced, and existing hallucination detection methods are compared.
L. Chubarova, A. Kuleshova, D. P. Volkov et al.· 0 citations
The central finding is a zero-refusal phenomenon: modern LLMs decline to discuss restricted books in only 0.07% of cases, effectively invalidating the premise of jailbreaking research for this content class.
MGAL is the first multilingual, granularity- and position-aware long-context benchmark, constructed from United Nations reports spanning 8K to 128K tokens across the six official UN languages, and finds that LLMs perform well at word-level tasks but struggle with coarser-grained ones.
Chunhan Li, Chenglin Xu, Zongyang Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Lexical normalization rewrites the noisy, non-standard words that fill user-generated text (tmrw, u, gr8) into their standard forms. Because labelled data is scarce for most languages, a popular shortcut is to train a single model on many languages at once. We ask a simple question: how many languages should such a model be trained on? Using one fixed-capacity character-level model and twelve languages from a standard benchmark, we vary the number of jointly trained languages from one to twelve and measure per-language accuracy. We find a clear curse of multilinguality: accuracy is highest when a language is trained with only a few others, often just one to four, and then falls steadily and substantially, dropping by about forty percent as the rest are piled on. A control that holds the total amount of training data constant makes the decline arrive sooner and fall further, which points to competition among the languages for one fixed-size model rather than to how much data is available. We also test whether a language's typological distance from the others predicts its ideal number of co-training languages, and find no dependable rule: any apparent relationship rests on a couple of languages and does not hold up. For compact normalization models, less can be more: a few languages beat pooling everything into a single model.
Saman Rahbar· 0 citations
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