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.
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.
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.
MBBQ (Multilingual Bias Benchmark for Question-answering) is a curated extension of the English BBQ dataset that includes Dutch, Spanish, and Turkish, designed to measure stereotypes across these languages while controlling for cultural differences and task accuracy. The dataset also provides a parallel control set to assess question-answering performance independently of bias. Experiments with several open-source and proprietary LLMs show that non‑English languages can exhibit greater bias than English, and cross‑lingual bias differences persist except in the most accurate models.
arXiv:2609.10253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in globally used assistants, yet their default choices in culturally grounded everyday situation...
Camellia is a new benchmark that tests cultural bias in large language models (LLMs) across nine Asian languages and six Asian cultures. It contains 19,530 manually annotated entities linked to Asian or Western cultures and 2,173 masked social‑media contexts for these entities. Using Camellia, the authors evaluate four multilingual LLMs on cultural context adaptation, sentiment association, and entity extractive QA, finding that models struggle with cultural adaptation, exhibit differing biases across regions and families, and have difficulty understanding context in some Asian languages.
The paper introduces the concept of Language Specific Knowledge (LSK), showing that multilingual language models can answer certain queries better when prompted in a language other than English, sometimes even in low‑resource languages. It defines a language‑selection problem and presents several baseline methods, including the authors’ LSKExtractor, to empirically demonstrate that choosing the optimal language can improve question‑answering performance across datasets covering cultural and social norms. Experiments reveal non‑intuitive mappings, such as Gemma models excelling on Chinese and Middle Eastern topics in Spanish and Qwen models performing best on authority and responsibility queries in Arabic and Chinese.
arXiv:2610.20472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cultural attitudes and social norms evolve over time, yet most cultural benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) treat culture as a static attribute...
arXiv:2608.29266v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Researchers increasingly treat LLM survey responses as a proxy for human cultural values. This includes projecting model outputs onto instruments lik...
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...
arXiv:2606. 01260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite being home to more than 1300 ethnic groups and 700 indigenous languages, bias in Large Language Models has not been fully studied in Indonesia, thus leaving a critical gap in evaluating representational fairness and localized stereotypes within its uniquely vast, multilingual, and diverse sociocultural landscape.
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...
The paper introduces CuCu, a multi‑agent LLM framework that converts national social studies curricula into open‑ended, culture‑specific question‑answer pairs for fine‑tuning language models. Using the Korean curriculum, the authors build KCaQA, a dataset of 34.1k QA pairs that cover culture‑specific topics and ground responses in local sociocultural contexts. Experiments show that fine‑tuning with KCaQA improves the model’s cultural alignment and relevance to Korean society.