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...
By Bhuvan Arora, Devesh Saraogi, Sravya Varada, Dhruv Kumar
WorldBench is a new multilingual benchmark that tests large language model agents on culturally grounded everyday workflows, offering 1,600 tasks in seven languages and eight cultures. The benchmark evaluates agents through structured sandbox actions and introduces Constrained Task Success (CTS), a metric that assesses task completion, minimal modification, and other complementary aspects via deterministic and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluations. Experiments show that even leading models achieve only 49.2% CTS, revealing significant gaps in correctness and state preservation across languages and cultures.
By Leonardo Ranaldi, Sherrie Shen, Jushi Kai, Alexandra Birch
Despite the growing use of LLM-powered agents to solve multi-step tasks in complex environments, existing benchmarks rarely test state preservation, performance across languages, and application to re...
The paper presents a unified evaluation of cross‑lingual consistency (CLC) enhancement methods for multilingual language models, covering inference‑time interventions and post‑training approaches across three model families and three closed‑form benchmarks. Results indicate that post‑training methods, especially direct distribution alignment, consistently improve CLC across all model‑dataset combinations, while other methods are more sensitive to answer format and language coverage. The study also examines the impact of CLC enhancement on culturally diverse question answering, finding no systematic degradation in controlled settings but occasional accuracy drops in open‑ended generation, particularly for non‑English responses.
By Jirui Qi, Mingyang Wang, Hinrich Sch\"utze, Raquel Fern\'andez, Arianna Bisazza
arXiv:2607. 20241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Culturally loaded translation poses unique challenges for machine translation (MT), as meanings are deeply embedded in socio-cultural contexts beyond surface linguistic forms.
By Yiming Wang, Jiayuan Di
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
CuBEs introduces culturally‑situated behavioral evaluations for large language models, adding cultural context to test scenarios and assessments. The authors built a human‑labeled dataset covering 12 cultures, revealing significant cross‑cultural differences that one‑size‑fits‑all judgments miss. Evaluating 13 LLMs shows that culturally situated tests uncover varied behaviors, such as Western political bias versus non‑Western religious or colonial biases, which standard evaluations overlook.
By Hoda Ayad, Tanu Mitra, Abhishek Mukherji
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:2607. 19243v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual fluency, their internal knowledge representations remain disproportionately biased toward high-resource languages.
By Alexander Manev
The paper compares Knowledge-Graph Based Augmentation (Graph-RAG) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for answering culturally specific questions. Using the LatamQA dataset, Graph-RAG, built automatically from Wikipedia via KGGen, matches RAG performance and reduces the base LLM’s error by 72% with a standard KG and 78% with a benchmark-aware variant. The approach also transfers zero‑shot to Portuguese, showing multilingual applicability.
By Pablo Poulenard, Yannis Karmim, Valentin Barri\`ere
arXiv:2510. 08543v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) are deployed globally, it is important to assess their ability to reason across cultural contexts.
By Nikhil Reddy Varimalla, Yunfei Xu, Meng Fan Wang, Arkadiy Saakyan, Smaranda Muresan
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.
By Vera Neplenbroek, Arianna Bisazza, Raquel Fern\'andez