Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

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This field studies how language models perform across cultures, including whether they preserve local meaning, represent community values, and behave safely in different settings. Researchers build native-speaker-validated benchmarks for tasks such as question answering, translation, social interaction, bias, and safety, and compare outputs with human judgments or survey distributions. Methods include paired language tests, culturally grounded prompts and evidence, distributional metrics, and statistical tools that separate language proficiency from knowledge. A central challenge is measuring cultural fit without treating a population as uniform or imposing a single standard, while making results reliable across prompts, evaluators, and subgroups.

Latest papers

121 papers26 papers in the last four weeks, up 136% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Mar 19, 2026

Cross-Lingual LLM-Judge Transfer via Evaluation Decomposition

As large language models are increasingly deployed across diverse real-world applications, extending automated evaluation beyond English has become a critical challenge. Existing evaluation approaches are predominantly English-focused, and adapting them to other languages is hindered by the scarcity and cost of human-annotated judgments in most languages. We introduce a decomposition-based evaluation framework built around a Universal Criteria Set (UCS). UCS consists of a shared, language-agnostic set of evaluation dimensions, producing an interpretable intermediate representation that supports cross-lingual transfer with minimal supervision. Experiments on multiple faithfulness tasks across languages and model backbones demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines without requiring target-language annotations.

Ivaxi Sheth, Zeno Jonke, Amin Mantrach +1

CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security · Amazon

Cross-Lingual Transfer Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation LLM-as-a-Judge

Mar 18, 2026

Harm or Humor: A Multimodal, Multilingual Benchmark for Overt and Covert Harmful Humor

Dark humor often relies on subtle cultural nuances and implicit cues that require contextual reasoning to interpret, posing safety challenges that current static benchmarks fail to capture. To address this, we introduce a novel multimodal, multilingual benchmark for detecting and understanding harmful and offensive humor. Our manually curated dataset comprises 3,000 texts and 6,000 images in English and Arabic, alongside 1,200 videos that span English, Arabic, and language-independent (universal) contexts. Unlike standard toxicity datasets, we enforce a strict annotation guideline: distinguishing Safe jokes from Harmful ones, with the latter further classified into Explicit (overt) and Implicit (Covert) categories to probe deep reasoning. We systematically evaluate state-of-the-art (SOTA) open and closed-source models across all modalities. Our findings reveal that closed-source models significantly outperform open-source ones, with a notable difference in performance between the English and Arabic languages in both, underscoring the critical need for culturally grounded, reasoning-aware safety alignment. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

Ahmed Sharshar, Hosam Elgendy, Saad El Dine Ahmed +2

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE · INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria

LLM Safety Benchmarks Language Model Safety Evaluation Multilingual Language Model Evaluation Multimodal Classification Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Mar 18, 2026

From Words to Worlds: Benchmarking Cross-Cultural Cultural Understanding in Machine Translation

Culture-expressions, such as idioms, slang, and culture-specific items (CSIs), are pervasive in natural language and encode meanings that go beyond literal linguistic form. Accurately translating such expressions remains challenging for machine translation systems. Despite this, existing benchmarks remain fragmented and do not provide a systematic framework for evaluating translation performance on culture-loaded expressions. To address this gap, we introduce CulT-Eval, a benchmark designed to evaluate how models handle different types of culturally grounded expressions. CulT-Eval comprises over 7,959 carefully curated instances spanning multiple types of culturally grounded expressions, with a comprehensive error taxonomy covering culturally grounded expressions. Through extensive evaluation of large language models and detailed analysis, we identify recurring and systematic failure modes that are not adequately captured by existing automatic metrics. Accordingly, we propose a complementary evaluation metric that targets culturally induced meaning deviations overlooked by standard MT metrics. The results indicate that current models struggle to preserve culturally grounded meaning and to capture the cultural and contextual nuances essential for accurate translation. Our benchmark and code are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CulT-Eval-E75D/.

Bangju Han, Yingqi Wang, Huang Qing +6

Xinjiang Technical Institute of Physics & Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China (second affiliation) · Xinjiang Laboratory of Minority Speech and Language Information Processing, Urumqi, China (third affiliation)

Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Machine Translation MT Evaluation

Mar 18, 2026

KMMMU: Evaluation of Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding in Korean Language and Context

Multimodal evaluation is strengthened when benchmarks reflect the languages, institutions, and disciplinary conventions that shape expert visual reasoning. We introduce KMMMU, a native Korean benchmark built from Korean-native examination materials. KMMMU contains 3,466 questions spanning nine disciplines and nine visual modality categories. For targeted evaluation on challenging questions and Korean-specific knowledge, we additionally provide KMMMU-Adv and KMMMU-Local, respectively. Experiments show that the strongest evaluated open-weight model reaches 42.05% on the KMMMU, while the best evaluated proprietary model achieves 52.42% on the KMMMU-Adv. Performance varies substantially across disciplines and answer formats, with Korean-specific questions showing gaps of up to 13.43%. Error analysis suggests that inspected failures often involve convention-to-label mapping, few-shot symbolic induction, localized knowledge recall, and domain-specific standards, not reasoning depth alone. KMMMU provides a testbed for native Korean expert-level multimodal understanding beyond English-centric or translation-based evaluation.

Nahyun Lee, Guijin Son, Hyunwoo Ko +4

Chung-Ang University · HAE-RAE · Seoul National University +2

Multimodal Model Evaluation Multimodal Understanding Multilingual VLM Evaluation Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Cultural Knowledge in Language Models

Mar 17, 2026

Prompt Programming for Cultural Bias and Alignment of Large Language Models

Culture shapes reasoning, values, prioritization, and strategic decision-making, yet large language models (LLMs) often exhibit cultural biases that misalign with target populations. As LLMs are increasingly used for strategic decision-making, policy support, and document engineering tasks such as summarization, categorization, and compliance-oriented auditing, improving cultural alignment is important for ensuring that downstream analyses and recommendations reflect target-population value profiles rather than default model priors. Previous work introduced a survey-grounded cultural alignment framework and showed that culture-specific prompting can reduce misalignment, but it primarily evaluated proprietary models and relied on manual prompt engineering. In this paper, we validate and extend that framework by reproducing its social sciences survey based projection and distance metrics on open-weight LLMs, testing whether the same cultural skew and benefits of culture conditioning persist outside closed LLM systems. Building on this foundation, we introduce use of prompt programming with DSPy for this problem-treating prompts as modular, optimizable programs-to systematically tune cultural conditioning by optimizing against cultural-distance objectives. In our experiments, we show that prompt optimization often improves upon cultural prompt engineering, suggesting prompt compilation with DSPy can provide a more stable and transferable route to culturally aligned LLM responses.

Maksim Eren, Eric Michalak, Brian Cook +1

Advanced Research in Cyber Systems, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA · Analytics Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA

LLM Alignment Cultural Alignment Cultural Bias in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Prompt Optimization

Mar 17, 2026

Assessing the Pedagogical Readiness of Large Language Models as AI Tutors in Low-Resource Contexts: A Case Study of Nepal's K-10 Curriculum

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into educational ecosystems promises to democratize access to personalized tutoring, yet the readiness of these systems for deployment in non-Western, low-resource contexts remains critically under-examined. This study presents a systematic evaluation of four state-of-the-art LLMs--GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, Qwen3-235B, and Kimi K2--assessing their capacity to function as AI tutors within the specific curricular and cultural framework of Nepal's Grade 5-10 Science and Mathematics education. We introduce a novel, curriculum-aligned benchmark and a fine-grained evaluation framework inspired by the "natural language unit tests" paradigm, decomposing pedagogical efficacy into seven binary metrics: Prompt Alignment, Factual Correctness, Clarity, Contextual Relevance, Engagement, Harmful Content Avoidance, and Solution Accuracy. Our results reveal a stark "curriculum-alignment gap." While frontier models (GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4) achieve high aggregate reliability (approximately 97%), significant deficiencies persist in pedagogical clarity and cultural contextualization. We identify two pervasive failure modes: the "Expert's Curse," where models solve complex problems but fail to explain them clearly to novices, and the "Foundational Fallacy," where performance paradoxically degrades on simpler, lower-grade material due to an inability to adapt to younger learners' cognitive constraints. Furthermore, regional models like Kimi K2 exhibit a "Contextual Blindspot," failing to provide culturally relevant examples in over 20% of interactions. These findings suggest that off-the-shelf LLMs are not yet ready for autonomous deployment in Nepalese classrooms. We propose a "human-in-the-loop" deployment strategy and offer a methodological blueprint for curriculum-specific fine-tuning to align global AI capabilities with local educational needs.

Pratyush Acharya, Prasansha Bharati, Yokibha Chapagain +2

AI in Education LLM Evaluation Intelligent Tutoring Systems Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Mar 16, 2026

BanglaSocialBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Sociopragmatic and Cultural Alignment of LLMs in Bangladeshi Social Interaction

Large Language Models have demonstrated strong multilingual fluency, yet fluency alone does not guarantee socially appropriate language use. In high-context languages, communicative competence requires sensitivity to social hierarchy, relational roles, and interactional norms that are encoded directly in everyday language. Bangla exemplifies this challenge through its three-tiered pronominal system, kinship-based addressing, and culturally embedded social customs. We introduce BanglaSocialBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate sociopragmatic competence in Bangla through context-dependent language use rather than factual recall. The benchmark spans three domains: Bangla Address Terms, Kinship Reasoning, and Social Customs, comprising 1,719 culturally grounded instances written and verified by native Bangla speakers. We evaluate twelve contemporary LLMs in a zero-shot setting and observe systematic patterns of cultural misalignment. Models frequently default to overly formal address forms, fail to recognize multiple socially acceptable address pronouns, and conflate kinship terminology across religious contexts. Our findings show that sociopragmatic failures are often structured and non-random; for example, inappropriate addressing choices concentrate heavily in downward-hierarchy (Elder

\rightarrow

Younger) and informal contexts. This reveals persistent limitations in how current LLMs infer and apply culturally appropriate language use in realistic Bangladeshi social interactions.

Tanvir Ahmed Sijan, S. M Golam Rifat, Pankaj Chowdhury Partha +2

Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh · Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology, Rajshahi, Bangladesh · Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models Cultural Bias in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Mar 16, 2026

Distributional Open-Ended Evaluation of LLM Cultural Value Alignment Based on Value Codebook

As LLMs are globally deployed, aligning their cultural value orientations is critical for safety and user engagement. However, existing benchmarks face the Construct-Composition-Context (

C^3

) challenge: relying on discriminative, multiple-choice formats that probe value knowledge rather than true orientations, overlook subcultural heterogeneity, and mismatch with real-world open-ended generation. We introduce DOVE, a distributional evaluation framework that directly compares human-written text distributions with LLM-generated outputs. DOVE utilizes a rate-distortion variational optimization objective to construct a compact value codebook from 10K documents, mapping text into a structured value space to filter semantic noise. Alignment is measured using unbalanced optimal transport, capturing intra-cultural distributional structures and subgroup diversity. Experiments across 12 LLMs show that DOVE achieves superior predictive validity, attaining a 31.56% correlation with downstream tasks, while maintaining high reliability with as few as 500 samples per culture.

Jaehyeok Lee, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao +4

Sungkyunkwan University · Microsoft Research Asia · Singapore University of Technology and Design

LLM Evaluation LLM Alignment Cultural Alignment Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Mar 16, 2026

Information Asymmetry across Language Varieties: A Case Study on Cantonese-Mandarin and Bavarian-German QA

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a common way for humans to seek knowledge, yet their coverage and reliability vary widely. Especially for local language varieties, there are large asymmetries, e.g., information in local Wikipedia that is absent from the standard variant. However, little is known about how well LLMs perform under such information asymmetry, especially on closely related languages. We manually construct a novel challenge question-answering (QA) dataset that captures knowledge conveyed on a local Wikipedia page, which is absent from their higher-resource counterparts-covering Mandarin Chinese vs. Cantonese and German vs. Bavarian. Our experiments show that LLMs fail to answer questions about information only in local editions of Wikipedia. Providing context from lead sections substantially improves performance, with further gains possible via translation. Our topical, geographic annotations, and stratified evaluations reveal the usefulness of local Wikipedia editions as sources of both regional and global information. These findings raise critical questions about inclusivity and cultural coverage of LLMs.

Renhao Pei, Siyao Peng, Verena Blaschke +2

MaiNLP, Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Germany · ELLIS Institute Finland +1

Multilingual QA Cultural Knowledge in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Knowledge Augmentation for Language Models

Mar 13, 2026

CLARIN-PT-LDB: An Open LLM Leaderboard for Portuguese to assess Language, Culture and Civility

This paper reports on the development of a leaderboard of Open Large Language Models (LLM) for European Portuguese (PT-PT), and on its associated benchmarks. This leaderboard comes as a way to address a gap in the evaluation of LLM for European Portuguese, which so far had no leaderboard dedicated to this variant of the language. The paper also reports on novel benchmarks, including some that address aspects of performance that so far have not been available in benchmarks for European Portuguese, namely model safeguards and alignment to Portuguese culture. The leaderboard is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/PORTULAN/portuguese-llm-leaderboard.

João Silva, Luís Gomes, António Branco

University of Lisbon NLX—Grupo de Fala e Linguagem Natural, Departmento de Informática Faculdade de Ciências, Campo Grande, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal

LLM Evaluation Portuguese Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation LLM Safety Benchmarks LLM Alignment

Mar 8, 2026

Dual-Metric Evaluation of Social Bias in Large Language Models: Evidence from an Underrepresented Nepali Cultural Context

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly influence global digital ecosystems, yet their potential to perpetuate social and cultural biases remains poorly understood in underrepresented contexts. This study presents a systematic analysis of representational biases in seven state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-4o-mini, Claude-3-Sonnet, Claude-4-Sonnet, Gemini-2.0-Flash, Gemini-2.0-Lite, Llama-3-70B, and Mistral-Nemo in the Nepali cultural context. Using Croissant-compliant dataset of 2400+ stereotypical and anti-stereotypical sentence pairs on gender roles across social domains, we implement an evaluation framework, Dual-Metric Bias Assessment (DMBA), combining two metrics: (1) agreement with biased statements and (2) stereotypical completion tendencies. Results show models exhibit measurable explicit agreement bias, with mean bias agreement ranging from 0.36 to 0.43 across decoding configurations, and an implicit completion bias rate of 0.740-0.755. Importantly, implicit completion bias follows a non-linear, U-shaped relationship with temperature, peaking at moderate stochasticity (T=0.3) and declining slightly at higher temperatures. Correlation analysis under different decoding settings revealed that explicit agreement strongly aligns with stereotypical sentence agreement but is a weak and often negative predictor of implicit completion bias, indicating generative bias is poorly captured by agreement metrics. Sensitivity analysis shows increasing top-p amplifies explicit bias, while implicit generative bias remains largely stable. Domain-level analysis shows implicit bias is strongest for race and sociocultural stereotypes, while explicit agreement bias is similar across gender and sociocultural categories, with race showing the lowest explicit agreement. These findings highlight the need for culturally grounded datasets and debiasing strategies for LLMs in underrepresented societies.

Ashish Pandey, Tek Raj Chhetri

Center for Artificial Intelligence Research Nepal, Sundarharaincha-09, Buddhabare, Nepal

Social Bias in Language Models Cultural Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation Gender Bias in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Mar 7, 2026

Taiwan Safety Benchmark and Breeze Guard: Toward Trustworthy AI for Taiwanese Mandarin

Global safety models exhibit strong performance across widely used benchmarks, yet their training data rarely captures the cultural and linguistic nuances of Taiwanese Mandarin. This limitation results in systematic blind spots when interpreting region-specific risks such as localized financial scams, culturally embedded hate speech, and misinformation patterns. To address these gaps, we introduce TS-Bench (Taiwan Safety Benchmark), a standardized evaluation suite for assessing safety performance in Taiwanese Mandarin. TS-Bench contains 400 human-curated prompts spanning critical domains including financial fraud, medical misinformation, social discrimination, and political manipulation. In parallel, we present Breeze Guard, an 8B safety model derived from Breeze 2, our previously released general-purpose Taiwanese Mandarin LLM with strong cultural grounding from its original pre-training corpus. Breeze Guard is obtained through supervised fine-tuning on a large-scale, human-verified synthesized dataset targeting Taiwan-specific harms. Our central hypothesis is that effective safety detection requires the cultural grounding already present in the base model; safety fine-tuning alone is insufficient to introduce new socio linguistic knowledge from scratch. Empirically, Breeze Guard significantly outperforms the leading 8B general-purpose safety model, Granite Guardian 3.3, on TS-Bench (+0.17 overall F1), with particularly large gains in high-context categories such as scam (+0.66 F1) and financial malpractice (+0.43 F1). While the model shows slightly lower performance on English-centric benchmarks (ToxicChat, AegisSafetyTest), this tradeoff is expected for a regionally specialized safety model optimized for Taiwanese Mandarin. Together, Breeze Guard and TS-Bench establish a new foundation for trustworthy AI deployment in Taiwan.

Po-Chun Hsu, Meng-Hsi Chen, Tsu Ling Chao +2

MediaTek Research · National Taiwan University

LLM Safety Language Model Safety Evaluation LLM Safety Benchmarks Cultural Knowledge in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Mar 6, 2026

Mind the Gap: Pitfalls of LLM Alignment with Asian Public Opinion

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed in multilingual, multicultural settings, yet their reliance on predominantly English-centric training data risks misalignment with the diverse cultural values of different societies. In this paper, we present a comprehensive, multilingual audit of the cultural alignment of contemporary LLMs including GPT-4o-Mini, Gemini-2.5-Flash, Llama 3.2, Mistral and Gemma 3 across India, East Asia and Southeast Asia. Our study specifically focuses on the sensitive domain of religion as the prism for broader alignment. To facilitate this, we conduct a multi-faceted analysis of every LLM's internal representations, using log-probs/logits, to compare the model's opinion distributions against ground-truth public attitudes. We find that while the popular models generally align with public opinion on broad social issues, they consistently fail to accurately represent religious viewpoints, especially those of minority groups, often amplifying negative stereotypes. Lightweight interventions, such as demographic priming and native language prompting, partially mitigate but do not eliminate these cultural gaps. We further show that downstream evaluations on bias benchmarks (such as CrowS-Pairs, IndiBias, ThaiCLI, KoBBQ) reveal persistent harms and under-representation in sensitive contexts. Our findings underscore the urgent need for systematic, regionally grounded audits to ensure equitable global deployment of LLMs.

Hari Shankar, Vedanta S P, Sriharini Margapuri +3

IIIT Hyderabad · IIIT Kottayam · IIT Kharagpur

Cultural Bias in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Social Bias in Language Models LLM Auditing Multilingual Language Model Evaluation

Mar 5, 2026

ThaiSafetyBench: Assessing Language Model Safety in Thai Cultural Contexts

The safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) remains largely centered on English, leaving non-English languages and culturally grounded risks underexplored. In this work, we investigate LLM safety in the context of the Thai language and culture and introduce ThaiSafetyBench, an open-source benchmark comprising 1,954 malicious prompts written in Thai. The dataset covers both general harmful prompts and attacks that are explicitly grounded in Thai cultural, social, and contextual nuances. Using ThaiSafetyBench, we evaluate 24 LLMs, with GPT-4.1 and Gemini-2.5-Pro serving as LLM-as-a-judge evaluators. Our results show that closed-source models generally demonstrate stronger safety performance than open-source counterparts, raising important concerns regarding the robustness of openly available models. Moreover, we observe a consistently higher Attack Success Rate (ASR) for Thai-specific, culturally contextualized attacks compared to general Thai-language attacks, highlighting a critical vulnerability in current safety alignment methods. To improve reproducibility and cost efficiency, we further fine-tune a DeBERTa-based harmful response classifier, which we name ThaiSafetyClassifier. The model achieves a weighted F1 score of 84.4%, matching GPT-4.1 judgments. We publicly release the fine-tuning weights and training scripts to support reproducibility. Finally, we introduce the ThaiSafetyBench leaderboard to provide continuously updated safety evaluations and encourage community participation. - ThaiSafetyBench HuggingFace Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/typhoon-ai/ThaiSafetyBench - ThaiSafetyBench Github: https://github.com/trapoom555/ThaiSafetyBench - ThaiSafetyClassifier HuggingFace Model: https://huggingface.co/typhoon-ai/ThaiSafetyClassifier - ThaiSafetyBench Leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/typhoon-ai/ThaiSafetyBench-Leaderboard

Trapoom Ukarapol, Nut Chukamphaeng, Kunat Pipatanakul +1

SCB DataX · Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University · SCBX R&D +1

Language Model Safety Evaluation LLM Safety LLM Safety Benchmarks LLM Safety Monitoring Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Multilingual Language Model Evaluation

Mar 4, 2026

Evaluating Large Language Models' Responses to Sexual and Reproductive Health Queries in Nepali

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become integrated into daily life, they are increasingly used for personal queries, including Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH), allowing users to chat anonymously without fear of judgment. However, current evaluation methods primarily focus on accuracy, often for objective queries in high-resource languages, and lack criteria to assess usability and safety, especially for low-resource languages and culturally sensitive domains like SRH. This paper introduces LLM Evaluation Framework (LEAF), that conducts assessments across multiple criteria: accuracy, language, usability gaps (including relevance, adequacy, and cultural appropriateness), and safety gaps (safety, sensitivity, and confidentiality). Using the LEAF framework, we assessed 14K SRH queries in Nepali from over 9K users. Responses were manually annotated by SRH experts according to the framework. Results revealed that only 35.1% of the responses were "proper", meaning they were accurate, adequate and had no major usability or safety related gaps. Insights include differences in performance between ChatGPT versions, such as similar accuracy but varying usability and safety aspects. This evaluation highlights significant limitations of current LLMs and underscores the need for improvement. The LEAF Framework is adaptable across domains and languages, particularly where usability and safety are critical, offering a pathway to better address sensitive topics.

Medha Sharma, Supriya Khadka, Udit Chandra Aryal +15

Visible Impact (Visim), Kathmandu, 44600, Nepal · Diyo.AI, Lalitpur, 44600, Nepal · Nepal Applied Mathematics and Informatics Institute for research (NAAMII), Lalitpur, 44600, Nepal +1

Language Model Safety Evaluation Medical QA Healthcare Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Multilingual Language Model Evaluation

Mar 3, 2026

Evidence-based Distributional Alignment for Large Language Models

Distributional alignment enables large language models (LLMs) to predict how a target population distributes its responses across answer options, rather than collapsing disagreement into a single consensus answer. However, existing LLM-based distribution prediction is often unstable and degrades under cultural and domain shift. Token score-based estimates can change with minor option wording or formatting, response sampling-based estimates are expensive and sensitive to prompts and decoding settings, and directly generated distributions are frequently miscalibrated. We propose Evi-DA, an evidence-based alignment technique that improves the fidelity and robustness of LLM-based distribution estimation under domain and cultural shift. Given a target country and a multiple-choice question, Evi-DA retrieves related World Values Survey items and their answer distributions, predicts a coarse Welzel value signature for each option, and infers the country-conditioned answer distribution in a structured format. We train the LLMs using a two-stage pipeline, where reinforcement learning optimizes survey-derived rewards that encourage accurate intermediate value predictions, faithful final distributions, well-formed structured outputs, and reduced cultural bias. Across in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks and multiple open-source backbones, Evi-DA reduces Jensen-Shannon divergence between predicted and gold distributions relative to strong baselines, with average relative improvements of up to 44%.

Viet-Thanh Pham, Lizhen Qu, Zhuang Li +1

Department of Data Science & AI, Monash University, Australia · Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia

LLM Alignment Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Cultural Bias in Language Models

Mar 2, 2026

LiveCultureBench: a Multi-Agent, Multi-Cultural Benchmark for Large Language Models in Dynamic Social Simulations

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, yet evaluations focus primarily on task success rather than cultural appropriateness or evaluator reliability. We introduce LiveCultureBench, a multi-cultural, dynamic benchmark that embeds LLMs as agents in a simulated town and evaluates them on both task completion and adherence to socio-cultural norms. The simulation models a small city as a location graph with synthetic residents having diverse demographic and cultural profiles. Each episode assigns one resident a daily goal while others provide social context. An LLM-based verifier generates structured judgments on norm violations and task progress, which we aggregate into metrics capturing task-norm trade-offs and verifier uncertainty. Using LiveCultureBench across models and cultural profiles, we study (i) cross-cultural robustness of LLM agents, (ii) how they balance effectiveness against norm sensitivity, and (iii) when LLM-as-a-judge evaluation is reliable for automated benchmarking versus when human oversight is needed.

Viet-Thanh Pham, Lizhen Qu, Thuy-Trang Vu +2

Department of Data Science & AI, Monash University

AI Agent Benchmarks Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Normative Conformity in Language Models Large Language Model-Based Social Simulation LLM-as-a-Judge

Mar 2, 2026

FLANS at SemEval-2026 Task 7: RAG with Open-Sourced Smaller LLMs for Everyday Knowledge Across Diverse Languages and Cultures

This system paper describes our participation in the SemEval-2025 Task-7 ``Everyday Knowledge Across Diverse Languages and Cultures''. We attended two subtasks, i.e., Track 1: Short Answer Questions (SAQ), and Track 2: Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQ). The methods we used are retrieval augmented generation (RAGs) with open-sourced smaller LLMs (OS-sLLMs). To better adapt to this shared task, we created our own culturally aware knowledge base (CulKBs) by extracting Wikipedia content using keyword lists we prepared. We extracted both culturally-aware wiki-text and country-specific wiki-summary. In addition to the local CulKBs, we also have one system integrating live online search output via DuckDuckGo. Towards better privacy and sustainability, we aimed to deploy smaller LLMs (sLLMs) that are open-sourced on the Ollama platform. We share the prompts we developed using refinement techniques and report the learning curve of such prompts. The tested languages are English, Spanish, and Chinese for both tracks. Our resources and codes are shared via https://github.com/aaronlifenghan/FLANS-2026

Liliia Bogdanova, Shiran Sun, Lifeng Han +2

Insilico Medicine AI Limited · University of Groningen · LIACS, Leiden University +1

Multilingual QA Knowledge Augmentation for Language Models Cultural Knowledge in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Mar 1, 2026

JailNewsBench: Multi-Lingual and Regional Benchmark for Fake News Generation under Jailbreak Attacks

Fake news undermines societal trust and decision-making across politics, economics, health, and international relations, and in extreme cases threatens human lives and societal safety. Because fake news reflects region-specific political, social, and cultural contexts and is expressed in language, evaluating the risks of large language models (LLMs) requires a multi-lingual and regional perspective. Malicious users can bypass safeguards through jailbreak attacks, inducing LLMs to generate fake news. However, no benchmark currently exists to systematically assess attack resilience across languages and regions. Here, we propose JailNewsBench, the first benchmark for evaluating LLM robustness against jailbreak-induced fake news generation. JailNewsBench spans 34 regions and 22 languages, covering 8 evaluation sub-metrics through LLM-as-a-Judge and 5 jailbreak attacks, with approximately 300k instances. Our evaluation of 9 LLMs reveals that the maximum attack success rate (ASR) reached 86.3% and the maximum harmfulness score was 3.5 out of 5. Notably, for English and U.S.-related topics, the defensive performance of typical multi-lingual LLMs was significantly lower than for other regions, highlighting substantial imbalances in safety across languages and regions. In addition, our analysis shows that coverage of fake news in existing safety datasets is limited and less well defended than major categories such as toxicity and social bias. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/kanekomasahiro/jail_news_bench.

Masahiro Kaneko, Ayana Niwa, Timothy Baldwin

MBZUAI

LLM Safety Benchmarks LLM Jailbreak Attacks Multilingual Language Model Evaluation Text Generation Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Mar 1, 2026

A Unified Framework to Quantify Cultural Intelligence of AI

As generative AI technologies are increasingly being launched across the globe, assessing their competence to operate in different cultural contexts is exigently becoming a priority. While recent years have seen numerous and much-needed efforts on cultural benchmarking, these efforts have largely focused on specific aspects of culture and evaluation. While these efforts contribute to our understanding of cultural competence, a unified and systematic evaluation approach is needed for us as a field to comprehensively assess diverse cultural dimensions at scale. Drawing on measurement theory, we present a principled framework to aggregate multifaceted indicators of cultural capabilities into a unified assessment of cultural intelligence. We start by developing a working definition of culture that includes identifying core domains of culture. We then introduce a broad-purpose, systematic, and extensible framework for assessing cultural intelligence of AI systems. Drawing on theoretical framing from psychometric measurement validity theory, we decouple the background concept (i.e., cultural intelligence) from its operationalization via measurement. We conceptualize cultural intelligence as a suite of core capabilities spanning diverse domains, which we then operationalize through a set of indicators designed for reliable measurement. Finally, we identify the considerations, challenges, and research pathways to meaningfully measure these indicators, specifically focusing on data collection, probing strategies, and evaluation metrics.

Sunipa Dev, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Rutledge Chin Feman +16

Google Research.

Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Generative AI Evaluation Cultural Knowledge in Language Models

Feb 26, 2026

TARAZ: Persian Short-Answer Question Benchmark for Cultural Evaluation of Language Models

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing the cultural competence of large language models (LLMs) in Persian. Existing Persian cultural benchmarks rely predominantly on multiple-choice formats and English-centric metrics that fail to capture Persian's morphological complexity and semantic nuance. Our framework introduces a Persian-specific short-answer evaluation that combines rule-based morphological normalization with a hybrid syntactic and semantic similarity module, enabling robust soft-match scoring beyond exact string overlap. Through systematic evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source models across three culturally grounded Persian datasets, we demonstrate that our hybrid evaluation improves scoring consistency by +10 compared to exact-match baselines by capturing meaning that surface-level methods cannot detect. Our human evaluation further confirms that the proposed semantic similarity metric achieves higher agreement with human judgments than LLM-based judges. We publicly release our evaluation framework, providing the first standardized benchmark for measuring cultural understanding in Persian and establishing a reproducible foundation for cross-cultural LLM evaluation research.

Reihaneh Iranmanesh, Saeedeh Davoudi, Pasha Abrishamchian +2

IR Lab, Computer Science Department Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

Cultural Knowledge in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Automated Evaluation Multilingual Language Model Evaluation Question Answering

Feb 25, 2026

When AI Writes, Whose Voice Remains? Quantifying Cultural Marker Erasure Across World English Varieties in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to ``professionalize'' workplace communication, often at the cost of linguistic identity. We introduce "Cultural Ghosting", the systematic erasure of linguistic markers unique to non-native English varieties during text processing. Through analysis of 22,350 LLM outputs generated from 1,490 culturally marked texts (Indian, Singaporean,& Nigerian English) processed by five models under three prompt conditions, we quantify this phenomenon using two novel metrics: Identity Erasure Rate (IER) & Semantic Preservation Score (SPS). Across all prompts, we find an overall IER of 10.26%, with model-level variation from 3.5% to 20.5% (5.9x range). Crucially, we identify a Semantic Preservation Paradox: models maintain high semantic similarity (mean SPS = 0.748) while systematically erasing cultural markers. Pragmatic markers (politeness conventions) are 1.9x more vulnerable than lexical markers (71.5% vs. 37.1% erasure). Our experiments demonstrate that explicit cultural-preservation prompts reduce erasure by 29% without sacrificing semantic quality.

Satyam Kumar Navneet, Joydeep Chandra, Yong Zhang

Independent Researcher Bihar, India · BNRIST, Dept. of CST, Tsinghua University Beijing, China

Linguistic Bias in Language Models Cultural Bias in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Feb 19, 2026

Towards Cross-lingual Values Judgment: A Consensus-Pluralism Perspective

As large language models (LLMs) are employed worldwide, existing evaluation paradigms for their multilingual capabilities primarily focus on factual task performance, neglecting the ability to judge content's deep-level values across multiple languages. To bridge this gap, we first reveal two primary challenges in constructing values judgment benchmarks, cultural diversity and disciplinary complexity, and propose a novel two-stage human-AI collaborative annotation framework to alleviate them. This framework identifies the issue scope and nature, establishes specific annotation criteria, and utilizes multiple LLMs for final review. Building upon this framework, we introduce X-Value, the first Cross-lingual Values Judgment Benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of LLMs in judging deep-level values of content. X-Value comprises 4,750 Question-Answer pairs across 14 languages, covering 7 major global issue categories, and provides 12 granular annotation metadata to facilitate a rigorous evaluation of model performance. Systematic evaluations of X-Value are conducted across 17 LLMs using distinct prompting strategies. Multi-dimensional analysis of accuracy and F1-scores reveals their limitations in cross-lingual values judgment and indicates performance disparities across categories and languages. This work highlights the urgent need to improve the underlying, values-aware content judgment capability of LLMs.\footnote{Samples of X-Value are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Whitolf/X-Value.}

Yukun Chen, Xinyu Zhang, Boyi Deng +6

State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University · Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security · Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group +1

Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Multilingual Language Model Evaluation

Feb 17, 2026

Far Out: Evaluating Language Models on Slang in Australian and Indian English

Language models exhibit systematic performance gaps when processing text in non-standard language varieties, yet their ability to comprehend variety-specific slang remains underexplored for several languages. We present a comprehensive evaluation of slang awareness in Indian English (en-IN) and Australian English (en-AU) across seven state-of-the-art language models. We construct two complementary datasets: WEB, containing 377 web-sourced usage examples from Urban Dictionary, and GEN, featuring 1,492 synthetically generated usages of these slang terms, across diverse scenarios. We assess language models on three tasks: target word prediction (TWP), guided target word prediction (TWP

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) and target word selection (TWS). Our results reveal four key findings: (1) Higher average model performance TWS versus TWP and TWP

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, with average accuracy score increasing from 0.03 to 0.49 respectively (2) Stronger average model performance on WEB versus GEN datasets, with average similarity score increasing by 0.03 and 0.05 across TWP and TWP

^*

tasks respectively (3) en-IN tasks outperform en-AU when averaged across all models and datasets, with TWS demonstrating the largest disparity, increasing average accuracy from 0.44 to 0.54. These findings underscore fundamental asymmetries between generative and discriminative competencies for variety-specific language, particularly in the context of slang expressions despite being in a technologically rich language such as English.

Deniz Kaya Dilsiz, Dipankar Srirag, Aditya Joshi

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

LLM Evaluation Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Feb 16, 2026

Robust Bias Evaluation with FilBBQ: A Filipino Bias Benchmark for Question-Answering Language Models

With natural language generation becoming a popular use case for language models, the Bias Benchmark for Question-Answering (BBQ) has grown to be an important benchmark format for evaluating stereotypical associations exhibited by generative models. We expand the linguistic scope of BBQ and construct FilBBQ through a four-phase development process consisting of template categorization, culturally aware translation, new template construction, and prompt generation. These processes resulted in a bias test composed of more than 10,000 prompts which assess whether models demonstrate sexist and homophobic prejudices relevant to the Philippine context. We then apply FilBBQ on models trained in Filipino but do so with a robust evaluation protocol that improves upon the reliability and accuracy of previous BBQ implementations. Specifically, we account for models' response instability by obtaining prompt responses across multiple seeds and averaging the bias scores calculated from these distinctly seeded runs. Our results confirm both the variability of bias scores across different seeds and the presence of sexist and homophobic biases relating to emotion, domesticity, stereotyped queer interests, and polygamy. FilBBQ is available via https://github.com/gamboalance/filbbq.

Lance Calvin Lim Gamboa, Yue Feng, Mark Lee

School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham · Department of Information Systems and Computer Science, Ateneo de Manila University

Social Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation Cultural Bias in Language Models Gender Bias in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Feb 10, 2026

Evaluating Geographic Lexical Knowledge in Large Language Models Across 21 Spanish-Speaking Countries

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve users across regional varieties, yet their knowledge of geographic lexical variation remains insufficiently evaluated. We investigate country-conditioned lexical usage judgments in Spanish using an expert-curated database covering 934 lexical items across 21 Spanish-speaking countries. Treating ten proprietary and open-weight LLMs as virtual informants, we evaluate two complementary question formats: Yes-No question format (YNQF) and multiple-choice question format (MCQF). The evaluation comprises 10,164 YNQF questions and 16,637 MCQF questions, assessed using F1 and an adjusted Jaccard coefficient, respectively. Results reveal substantial differences across models, countries, and formats. Spain receives the highest country-level score for eight models in YNQF and nine in MCQF; Chile receives the lowest MCQF score for every model. Regression analyses suggest that digital resource volume is generally more strongly associated with YNQF performance, whereas lexical distance from Spain is more strongly associated with MCQF performance. These findings provide a fine-grained diagnostic of uneven regional lexical knowledge and highlight the importance of complementary elicitation formats and evaluation metrics. The benchmark measures explicit usage judgments, motivating separate assessment of region-appropriate generation.

Yoshifumi Kawasaki

University of Tokyo

Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Jan 29, 2026

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

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. This paper investigates the alignment of synthetic, culturally-grounded personas with established frameworks, specifically the World Values Survey (WVS), the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map, and Moral Foundations Theory. We conceptualize and produce LLM-generated personas based on a set of interpretable WVS-derived variables, and we examine the generated personas through three complementary lenses: positioning on the Inglehart-Welzel map, which unveils their interpretation reflecting stable differences across cultural conditionings; demographic-level consistency with the World Values Survey, where response distributions broadly track human group patterns; and moral profiles derived from a Moral Foundations questionnaire, which we analyze through a culture-to-morality mapping to characterize how moral responses vary across different cultural configurations. Our approach of culturally-grounded persona generation and analysis enables evaluation of cross-cultural structure and moral variation.

Candida M. Greco, Lucio La Cava, Andrea Tagarelli

DIMES, University of Calabria, Italy

Cultural Alignment Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Moral Reasoning

Jan 29, 2026

MasalBench: A Benchmark for Contextual and Cross-Cultural Understanding of Persian Proverbs in LLMs

In recent years, multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an inseparable part of daily life, making it crucial for them to master the rules of conversational language in order to communicate effectively with users. While previous work has evaluated LLMs' understanding of figurative language in high-resource languages, their performance in low-resource languages remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce MasalBench, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing LLMs' contextual and cross-cultural understanding of Persian proverbs, which are a key component of conversation in this low-resource language. We evaluate eight state-of-the-art LLMs on MasalBench and find that they perform well in identifying Persian proverbs in context, achieving accuracies above 0.90. However, their performance drops considerably when tasked with identifying equivalent English proverbs, with the best model achieving 0.79 accuracy. Our findings highlight the limitations of current LLMs in cultural knowledge and analogical reasoning, and they provide a framework for assessing cross-cultural understanding in other low-resource languages. MasalBench is available at https://github.com/kalhorghazal/MasalBench.

Ghazal Kalhor, Behnam Bahrak

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran · Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies, Khatam University, Tehran, Iran

Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Figurative Language Understanding Cultural Knowledge in Language Models Low-Resource Language Processing

Oct 15, 2025

The Alignment Veto: How Safety Training Suppresses Cultural Knowledge in LLMs

What happens inside a language model when alignment training conflicts with a cultural value it encodes? Across 16 MENA countries, 26 models, and 1.53M human survey responses, we show the answer is suppression, not erasure: at the moment of refusal, a model's internal logit distribution correlates with human survey data more strongly than its freely generated answers. We call this the alignment veto. We distinguish suppression failures (accurate internal distributions blocked at output) from representational bias failures (the encoding itself diverges from human values), and show the two require different interventions. The gate is inequitable: the safety tax reaches 37.6%, with a 19.8% alignment-quality gap between best- and worst-served nations, and native-language prompting widens rather than closes it. Sparse autoencoder analysis corroborated by comparisons across alignment stages identifies a candidate DPO-stage feature mediating suppression in Tulu-3-8B. The gate is real, its costs are unequal, and deciding what it should protect is not a technical question.

Pardis Sadat Zahraei, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür +1

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) · Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University

LLM Alignment Refusal Behavior in Language Models Cultural Knowledge in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

Sep 25, 2025

One Model, Many Morals: Uncovering Cross-Linguistic Misalignments in Computational Moral Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across multilingual and multicultural settings, yet it remains unclear whether changing language leads models to adopt community-specific moral reasoning or merely changes how shared learned abstractions are expressed. We conduct a controlled multilingual evaluation across six geographically, culturally, and linguistically diverse languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, Hindi, Russian, and Spanish), using parallel moral reasoning benchmarks with English-origin, Chinese-origin, and natively elicited ground-truth judgments. Across 13 open-weight LLMs spanning 2B-70B parameters, we find substantial cross-lingual divergence in moral judgments, with English generally achieving the highest performance even when ground-truth judgments originate in Chinese or are collected natively in each language. Yet the reasoning underlying these divergent judgments is considerably more convergent: Utilitarianism dominates in five of six languages, reasoning follows broadly shared stages, and language-specific moral-value associations correspond only sparsely and inconsistently to values measured in the corresponding human communities. Finally, a large-scale OLMoTrace analysis of pretraining data sources reveals little direct reproduction of training text across languages, while the corpus composition, training stage, and cultural provenance of retrieved training evidence vary substantially by response language. Thus, similar moral reasoning structures emerge even from heterogeneous and often linguistically localized training evidence. Our findings, collectively, reveal a central disconnect in multilingual moral reasoning: language changes models' moral judgments and the training evidence associated with their reasoning, but does not correspondingly localize the moral abstractions they apply.

Sualeha Farid, Jayden Lin, Zean Chen +2

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Multilingual Language Model Evaluation Moral Reasoning in Language Models Cross-Lingual Reasoning in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Cultural Bias in Language Models Cross-Lingual Consistency in Language Models+1