aiqbench analysis
Terminal-Bench-LILT exposes a critical gap in current AI coding agents by demonstrating their inability to handle non-English software development contexts, where performance drops significantly compared to English-only benchmarks. The benchmark reveals that multilingual competence is a distinct capability axis requiring specific evaluation beyond general coding proficiency, as even frontier models fail on culturally specific tasks like internationalization and encoding normalization. This research underscores the urgent need for diverse training data and evaluation protocols to prepare AI tools for real-world global deployment.
Terminal-Bench-LILT: Multilingual Agentic Coding Benchmark Grounded in Language, Region, and Culture
arXiv:2608.28641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most evaluations for coding agents are conducted exclusively in English, which does not reflect real-world multilingual deployment. We present Terminal-Bench-LILT, a suite of 300 authentic coding tasks in ten languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Spanish, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Serbian, Turkish, and Chinese. Each task targets issues specific to non-English software development that have no direct English equivalent, e.g., internationalization, encoding, text normalization, and cultural conventions. All tasks are authored by native-speaker programmers and validated through a multi-stage quality control pipeline. Evaluation of six frontier models reveals that even the strongest model reaches only 63.1\% pass rate, with many tasks unsolved by any model. Performance varies substantially by language and does not track general coding benchmark rankings, highlighting that multilingual coding competence is a distinct and underexplored capability axis. Sample tasks are available at https://github.com/lilt/terminal-bench-lilt
Abstract:Most evaluations for coding agents are conducted exclusively in English, which does not reflect real-world multilingual deployment. We present Terminal-Bench-LILT, a suite of 300 authentic coding tasks in ten languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Spanish, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Serbian, Turkish, and Chinese. Each task targets issues specific to non-English software development that have no direct English equivalent, e.g., internationalization, encoding, text normalization, and cultural conventions. All tasks are authored by native-speaker programmers and validated through a multi-stage quality control pipeline. Evaluation of six frontier models reveals that even the strongest model reaches only 63.1\% pass rate, with many tasks unsolved by any model. Performance varies substantially by language and does not track general coding benchmark rankings, highlighting that multilingual coding competence is a distinct and underexplored capability axis. Sample tasks are available at this https URL
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2608.28641 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.28641v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28641 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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