Large Language Models Only Pass Primary School Exams in Indonesia: A Comprehensive Test on IndoMMLU

Fajri Koto, Nurul Aisyah, Haonan Li, Timothy Baldwin

Submission Type: Regular Long Paper

Submission Track: Theme Track: Large Language Models and the Future of NLP

Submission Track 2: Resources and Evaluation

Keywords: large language models, Indonesian school exam problems, evaluation, local languages and cultures

TL;DR: We evaluate large language models on school exam questions across different education levels and subjects in Indonesia, and we find that the best model only passes primary school exams, with limited knowledge of local languages and cultures.

Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) are often pre-trained on large-scale multilingual texts, their reasoning abilities and real-world knowledge are mainly evaluated based on English datasets. Assessing LLM capabilities beyond English is increasingly vital but hindered due to the lack of suitable datasets. In this work, we introduce IndoMMLU, the first multi-task language understanding benchmark for Indonesian culture and languages, which consists of questions from primary school to university entrance exams in Indonesia. By employing professional teachers, we obtain 14,981 questions across 64 tasks and education levels, with 46% of the questions focusing on assessing proficiency in the Indonesian language and knowledge of nine local languages and cultures in Indonesia. Our empirical evaluations show that GPT-3.5 only manages to pass the Indonesian primary school level, with limited knowledge of local Indonesian languages and culture. Other smaller models such as BLOOMZ and Falcon perform at even lower levels.

Submission Number: 3978