KBS: A Korean Benchmark Suite for Foundation Model Evaluation

Yeonkyoung So, Jongmin Kim, Sungmok Jung, Gyuseong Lee, Sangho Kim +11

We present a Korean Benchmark Suite (KBS) comprising Ko-ARC, Ko-GSM8K, Ko-EQ-Bench, Ko-WinoGrande, Ko-LAMBADA, and Ko-IFEval, covering six capabilities across 9,396 items. The suite combines review, localization, direct Korean construction, and redesign for Korean, avoiding a translation-only approach to benchmark adaptation. We evaluate Korean-developed models, multilingual open models, and closed API models under protocols that account for model access, prompt format, and scoring differences. Results show that Korean benchmark scores depend on task construction, scoring rules, prompting, and model post-training. These findings suggest that Korean evaluation should report both final scores and the settings used to obtain them.