The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) represent nine transborder ethnic communities along China’s southwestern border with mainland Southeast Asia, such as the Sami, Rohingya, and Kurds. It introduces the concept of identity ossification, where LLMs reduce fluid, cross-border identities to a single nation-state narrative, and presents the Transborder Identity Ossification Diagnostic Framework (TIODF) to differentiate between knowledge gaps and narrative framing. Experiments with GPT‑5.1 and DeepSeek‑V3.2 in English and Chinese show that ossification rates vary widely, with DeepSeek‑V3.2’s Chinese responses exhibiting the phenomenon in 62.6% of cases, indicating that narrative framing rather than mere knowledge absence drives the issue.
arXiv:2608. 02486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLMs reliably name Zeus, Jupiter, and Thor, but recover their counterparts in less-represented traditions like Finnish, Slavic, Egyptian, or Chinese mythology far less consistently.
CHARM is a multicultural benchmark that tests large language models’ ability to adopt a character’s style while respecting knowledge boundaries. It includes 40 real and fictional characters from five cultural-linguistic regions and evaluates two boundary types—Temporal and Cross-Universe—using abstention-enabled multiple-choice questions. The study finds that hallucinations mainly stem from compliance failures: models often recognize a query is out of scope yet still provide out-of-character answers, revealing systematic cultural variations in these errors.
The paper introduces the Middle East Cultural Sensitivity Score (MECSS) to quantify Orientalist bias in large language models, converting Said’s seven Orientalist operations into measurable dimensions. Using 280 conversations, it finds that GPT‑4 and Falcon3‑7B‑Instruct systematically reproduce Orientalist patterns, with Falcon scoring higher despite being regionally built. The study highlights that geographic origin alone does not mitigate bias and identifies a new failure mode, "Said‑washing," present in 87.9% of GPT‑4 interactions.
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.
arXiv:2609.00491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communicating across cultures is inherently challenging, especially through culturally dense and ambiguous formats like memes. While people expect larg...
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 study investigates how a single politically charged framing term can influence large language models (LLMs) during translation tasks. By prompting eight models from Western, Chinese, and European origins to translate culturally attributed recipes across 17 languages under four framing conditions, the authors find that models resolve ambiguity rather than decline, with distinct behavior patterns tied to model families. Sensitivity to framing terms is consistent, showing that even subtle variations can modulate LLM behavior, raising concerns about implicit political judgments in translation contexts.
arXiv:2606.11009v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to adapt math word problems for personalized learning at scale, but it remains an open question whether...
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.
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: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...
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.