IrokoBench

Despite the widespread adoption of Large language models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities remain limited to a few high-resource languages. Additionally, many low-resource languages (e.g. African languages) are often evaluated only on basic text classification tasks due to the lack of appropriate or comprehensive benchmarks outside of high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce IrokoBench – a human-translated benchmark dataset for 17 typologically-diverse low-resource African languages covering three tasks: natural language inference (AfriXNLI), mathematical reasoning (AfriMGSM), and multi-choice knowledge-based question answering (AfriMMLU). We use IrokoBench to evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and translate-test settings (where test sets are translated into English) across 10 open and six proprietary LLMs. Our evaluation reveals a significant performance gap between high-resource languages (such as English and French) and low-resource African languages. We observe a significant performance gap between open and proprietary models, with the highest performing open model, Gemma 2 27B only at 63% of the best-performing proprietary model GPT-4o performance. In addition, machine translating the test set to English before evaluation helped to close the gap for larger models that are English-centric, such as Gemma 2 27B and LLaMa 3.1 70B. These findings suggest that more efforts are needed to develop and adapt LLMs for African languages.