arXiv Computation and Language By Samee Arif, Furkan Danisman, Angana Borah, Honglak Lee, Dehan Kong, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Moontae Lee, Zhijing Jin, Rada Mihalcea

The Culture Within: Towards Mechanistic Understanding of Cultural Reasoning in LLMs

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The paper introduces CultureLens, a benchmark with 9,261 scenarios from 75 countries that tests how large language models (LLMs) incorporate cultural information. Experiments on Llama‑3.1‑8B, Gemma‑3‑12B, and Qwen‑3.5‑27B show that presenting a contradictory cultural norm reduces aligned answers by 32‑47 percentage points, even when the model knows the correct country. Fine‑tuning with contradictory‑norm examples improves alignment to 85‑93% under contradictory norms while only slightly affecting performance under true norms.

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