arXiv AI

Culturally Grounded Personas in Large Language Models: Characterization and Alignment with Socio-Psychological Value Frameworks

arXiv:2601. 22396v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the growing utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) for simulating human behavior, the extent to which these synthetic personas accurately reflect world and moral value systems across different cultural conditionings remains uncertain.

arXiv AI
Sep 21

Lessons Without Borders? Evaluating Cultural Alignment of LLMs Using Multilingual Story Moral Generation

The paper introduces a multilingual story moral generation task to evaluate cultural alignment in large language models. Using a dataset of human-written story morals from 14 language‑culture pairs, the authors compare model outputs to human interpretations through semantic similarity, a preference survey, and value categorization. They find that advanced models like GPT‑4o and Gemini produce morally similar and preferred responses but show less cross‑linguistic variation, focusing on a narrower set of shared values, indicating a limitation in capturing the diversity of human narrative understanding.

By Sophie Wu, Andrew Piper
arXiv AI
Sep 10

The Failure Happens Before the Drift: The Social Dynamics of Values in LLM Agent Societies

The study introduces a World Values Survey–grounded simulation framework to test whether large language model agents can faithfully represent diverse human value systems. In about 4,000 conversations with 1,200 personas across three models, more than half of the agents failed to express their assigned value profiles from the start, and only 2–7% drifted over time. The results show systematic deviations from the intended value distributions and reveal that simulated dialogues differ from human discussions in their balance of stylistic consistency and semantic diversity.

By Farah Atif, Sougata Saha, Monojit Choudhury
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

PERSONAWEAVER: Controllable Diversity Beyond Conventional Archetypes in Procedural Character Generation

PERSONAWEAVER is a new approach to procedural character generation that separates world building from behavioral specification, using manually curated banks of moral positions and conversational reactions to diversify character behavior. By applying this method across ten realistic and fantastical settings and three large language models, the system produces broader moral and interactional response distributions, varied interpersonal language, response length, sentiment, and less archetypal world attribute combinations compared to prior work.

By Maan Qraitem, Kate Saenko, Bryan A. Plummer
arXiv AI
4d ago

Calibrated to Whom? Persona and Language Effects on Cultural Values in JEV

The study audits the cultural values expressed by the decision‑only language model JEV using the 2013 Values Survey Module. By presenting 24 items to JEV under 12 matched Saudi and 12 matched American personas, in both English and Arabic, and across eight request formulations, the researchers found that JEV’s responses were highly repeatable (ICC 0.997) and that persona and language significantly influenced the model’s value profiles. Saudi personas shifted JEV’s answers toward the human Saudi‑US difference—capturing 87 % of the effect in English and 62 % in Arabic—while language, age, and gender also modulated the outcomes.

By Bushra Asseri, Abdulaziz Asseri
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 9

PLURAL: A Global Dataset for Value Alignment

Large language models (LLMs) are used worldwide, yet disproportionately reflect Western values, limiting their ability to represent diverse value systems. We introduce PLURAL, a large-scale, value-focused preference dataset grounded in the Integrated Values Survey (IVS), a nationally representative survey spanning 92 countries.