The paper proposes a method for culturally aligning large language models (LLMs) using soft prompt tuning optimized via Differential Evolution (DE). Unlike traditional fine‑tuning or reinforcement learning, this approach keeps model weights frozen and requires no preference data, instead leveraging aggregated survey scores from Hofstede's Value Survey Module (VSM13). Experiments on four countries and four instruction‑tuned models show that DE‑optimized prompts reduce cultural discrepancy, improve agreement with the World Values Survey, and are preferred in blinded pairwise evaluations by LLM judges.
By Reem I. Masoud, Martin Ferianc, Philip Treleaven, Miguel Rodrigues
arXiv:2602.01161v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The global deployment of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about cultural misalignment, yet the linguistic properties of fine-tuning...
By Reem I. Masoud, Chen Feng, Shunta Asano, Saied Alshahrani, Philip Colin Treleaven, Miguel R. D. Rodrigues
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.
By Tarek Naous, Anagha Savit, Carlos Rafael Catalan, Geyang Guo, Jaehyeok Lee, Kyungdon Lee, Lheane Marie Dizon, Mengyu Ye, Neel Kothari, Sahajpreet Singh, Sarah Masud, Tanish Patwa, Trung Thanh Tran, Zohaib Khan, Alan Ritter, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yuki Arase, Keisuke Sakaguchi, JinYeong Bak, Wei Xu
arXiv:2509. 08022v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse human values is essential for safe and effective deployment, yet existing benchmarks often overlook cultural and demographic variation.
By Yao Liang, Dongcheng Zhao, Feifei Zhao, Guobin Shen, Yuwei Wang, Dongqi Liang, Yi Zeng
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
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