MM-Eval: A Multilingual Meta-Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-as-a-Judge and Reward Models

Abstract

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are now capable of producing fluent and coherent content in languages other than English, it is not imperative to precisely evaluate these non-English outputs. However, when assessing the outputs from mutlilingual LLMs, prior works often employed LLM based evaluators that excel at assessing English outputs, without a thorough examination of whether these evaluators could effectively assess non-English text as well. Moreover, existing benchmarks to test evaluator LLMs (referred to as "meta-evaluation benchmarks") are mostly English-centric. To bridge this gap and examine whether evaluator LLMs can reliably assess the outputs of multilingual LLMs, we introduce MM-Eval, a multilingual meta-evaluation benchmark comprising five core subsets covering 18 languages and a Language Consistency subset spanning 122 languages. A core attribute of MM-Eval is that, instead of merely translating existing English meta-evaluation benchmarks, it is designed with multilingual-specific challenges in mind. Additionally, unlike existing meta-evaluation benchmarks that focus solely on ranking accuracy over pairwise data, MM-Eval also evaluates the consistency and fairness of absolute score values across a wide range of languages. Our results show that existing evaluator LLMs that excel in English contexts have considerable room for improvement when assessing non-English outputs. Furthermore, we find that evaluators are unfair and inconsistent when evaluating lower-resourced languages. Finally, we validate MM-Eval by measuring its correlation with Best-of-N rankings, finding a significantly stronger correlation compared to other meta-evaluation benchmarks. We publicly release our benchmark and code.