Preference optimisation has proven effective for improving large language models but typically relies on costly human preference annotations. Extending these methods to morphologically rich, low-resource languages remains challenging because such annotations are scarce.
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:2608.23149v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The alignment of Large Language Models heavily relies on English-centric high-quality preference data, which often leads to suboptimal performance in...
By Seungyoon Lee, Minhyuk Kim, Jungseob Lee, Heuiseok Lim
The paper introduces Cross‑lingual Ranking Preference Optimization (CRPO), a framework that uses high‑quality English preference data to improve alignment of large language models in other languages. CRPO builds a hierarchical structure over parallel preference pairs, jointly optimizing intra‑ and inter‑lingual preferences and providing a relative ranking signal beyond binary comparisons. Experiments on five languages show consistent gains in instruction‑following and knowledge utilization, with robust performance across different weighting schemes and improved reward margins and log‑probabilities of desirable responses.
By Seungyoon Lee, Minhyuk Kim, Jungseob Lee, Heuiseok Lim
arXiv:2509. 23982v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Preference alignment is a critical step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) useful and aligned with (human) preferences.
By Lucio La Cava, Andrea Tagarelli
The paper presents a pipeline that leverages large language models to extract grammatical rules, example sentences, and lexicons from descriptive grammar books, producing synthetic parallel corpora for fine‑tuning machine translation models. Evaluated on three low‑resource languages—Kalamang, Tuatschin, and Mandan—the synthetic data improves translation quality over seed‑data baselines in 75% of configurations for Kalamang and 59% for Tuatschin, achieving up to +8.8 ChrF++ gains. A factorial study across 96 configurations identifies which combinations of target part‑of‑speech, retrieval granularity, and sample volume drive performance gains and where they fail, demonstrating that static linguistic documentation can be repurposed for practical translation tools for severely under‑resourced languages.
By Varun Ghat Ravikumar, Sina Ahmadi, Lena J\"ager, Rico Sennrich