The paper introduces CAPRI, a dataset of conversations designed to test whether large language models (LLMs) can adapt their responses to users’ cultural backgrounds. Experiments show that while LLMs can infer a user’s cultural context and recall relevant conventions, they frequently fail to apply this knowledge when generating answers unless explicitly prompted to do so. The study also finds that LLMs’ cultural adaptations improve as more cues are provided, yet their default priors are not culture‑neutral and sometimes reflect the model’s country of origin.
By Yisong Miao, Jian Zhu, Vered Shwartz
arXiv:2608.22411v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Social interaction increasingly takes place in multicultural settings, where individuals may draw on multiple cultural influences and adapt their commu...
By Chongyuan Dai, Yaling Shen, Shengeng Tang, Hui Ma, Jinpeng Hu
arXiv:2601. 14063v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cross-cultural competence in large language models (LLMs) requires understanding and adapting Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) across varying cultural contexts.
By Mohsinul Kabir, Tasnim Ahmed, Md Mezbaur Rahman, Shaoxiong Ji, Hassan Alhuzali, Yuechen Jiang, Jimin Huang, Sophia Ananiadou
arXiv:2609.00565v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Cultural fine-tuning has become the de facto paradigm for building culture-aware large language models (LLMs), yet existing optimization exclusively...
By Jingshen Zhang, Shaoyang Xu, Wenxuan Zhang
arXiv:2605.12515v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) often answer culturally ambiguous questions inconsistently across languages, even for a fixed user perso...
By Lucas Resck, Isabelle Augenstein, Anna Korhonen
arXiv:2608.30873v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used for interpersonal advice and as tools for studying social behavior across languages and cultures. A common shortcut for el...
By Jinhee Won, Xinlan Emily Hu
arXiv:2608.28405v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Current cultural evaluations for large language models (LLMs) often reduce culture to single-turn factual recall via MCQs, failing to capture a common...
By Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Weihua Zheng, Thong T. Doan, Bich Ngoc Doan, Jia Wang Peh, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao, Xing Xie, Nancy F. Chen, Zhengyuan Liu, JinYeong Bak, Wafi Shamdi, Soo Kai Chie, Liew Yu Siong, Aina Azyyati Binti Mohamad Rezal, Lew Yan Yan Vanessa, Huadan Wu, Dylan Raharja, Nadya Yuki Wangsajaya, Akane Fukushige, Kazushi Kato, Koji Inoue, Tatsuya Kawahara, Jaehyung Seo, Dongjun Kim, Seungyoon Lee, Zi Haur Pang, Rui Yang Tan, Charibeth Ko Cheng, Maria Regina Justina Estuar, Jann Railey Montalan, Pham Minh Duc, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
The paper investigates cultural biases in large language models (LLMs) by introducing the Culture-Related Open Questions (CROQ) dataset, which contains 24‑language questions about generic culture. Experiments reveal that LLMs disproportionately favor Japan in their responses, especially when prompted in high‑resource languages, while low‑resource languages tend to highlight countries where the language is official. The study also finds that these biases emerge after supervised fine‑tuning rather than during pre‑training.
By Joseba Fernandez de Landa, Carla Perez-Almendros, Jose Camacho-Collados
arXiv:2609.22494v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in Cultural NLP, with substantial efforts to create globally inclusive NLP systems. The rapid growt...
By Tania Chakraborty, Eylon Caplan, Zhaoqing Wu, Kevin Cushing, Han Qin, Shreya Havaldar, Dan Goldwasser
arXiv:2607. 05405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To interact with users fairly and without stereotyping, AI models must display cultural competency, i.
By Vasudha Varadarajan, Akhila Yerukola, Mona T. Diab, Maarten Sap
arXiv:2606. 07422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to answer culturally grounded questions across languages, yet it remains unclear whether local cultural knowledge is better accessed through English or the local language.
By Yang Zhang, Xiao Fei, Amr Mohamed, Sarah Almeida Carneiro, Mersin Konomi, Mingmeng Geng, Ahmed Asaad, Guokan Shang, Michalis Vazirgiannis
The paper proposes the interlingua hypothesis, suggesting that large language models translate by encoding a source sentence into a latent, task‑agnostic feature space and then decoding a target sentence from that space. Three lines of evidence support this: (1) BLEU variance across language pairs is largely explained by language‑specific competences without pair‑specific interactions; (2) many model components influence both monolingual and translation tasks; and (3) fine‑tuning on monolingual data recovers most translation gains seen with aligned documents. These findings converge to support the hypothesis and point toward new ways to understand and improve LLM translation.
By Jacob Brinton, Jannik Brinkmann, Mark Crovella, Aaron Mueller