GAIA-v2-LILT: Multilingual Adaptation of Agent Benchmark beyond Translation

arXiv cs.CL / 4/29/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper argues that multilingual agent benchmarks built mainly via machine translation and light post-editing can become invalid due to query–answer misalignment and culturally irrelevant context.
  • It proposes a refined adaptation workflow that explicitly aligns functions, cultural context, and difficulty calibration, validated through automated checks plus human review.
  • Using this workflow, the authors introduce GAIA-v2-LILT, a re-audited multilingual extension of the GAIA agent benchmark spanning five non-English languages.
  • Experiments show that the workflow boosts agent success rates by up to 32.7% versus minimally translated baselines and narrows performance to within 3.1% of English in the closest audited setting.
  • The work suggests that much of the multilingual performance gap is caused by benchmark measurement error, and it provides both the dataset (via MAPS on Hugging Face) and the experimental code on GitHub.

Abstract

Agent benchmarks remain largely English-centric, while their multilingual versions are often built with machine translation (MT) and limited post-editing. We argue that, for agentic tasks, this minimal workflow can easily break benchmark validity through query-answer misalignment or culturally off-target context. We propose a refined workflow for adapting English benchmarks into multiple languages with explicit functional alignment, cultural alignment, and difficulty calibration using both automated checks and human review. Using this workflow, we introduce GAIA-v2-LILT, a re-audited multilingual extension of GAIA covering five non-English languages. In experiments, our workflow improves agent success rates by up to 32.7% over minimally translated versions, bringing the closest audited setting to within 3.1% of English performance while substantial gaps remain in many other cases. This indicates that a substantial share of the multilingual performance gap is benchmark-induced measurement error, motivating task-level alignment when adapting English benchmarks across languages. The data is available as part of the MAPS package at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Fujitsu-FRE/MAPS/viewer/GAIA-v2-LILT. We also release the code used in our experiments at https://github.com/lilt/gaia-v2-lilt.