Cultural Bias in Language Models

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Overview

Cultural bias research asks whether language models represent and respond to different communities’ knowledge, values, identities, and social norms fairly, rather than defaulting to dominant or English-language perspectives. Researchers build locally authored multilingual benchmarks and compare model answers, generated stories, safety decisions, and survey-style value distributions with native-speaker judgments and population data. Mitigation approaches include culturally grounded training and retrieval, persona or prompt conditioning, preference calibration, and activation-level steering, alongside audits of data and post-training. A central tension is that models may know culturally relevant facts but fail to apply them, while stronger alignment can flatten within-culture diversity or impose stereotypes; reliable measurement across languages and contexts remains difficult.

Latest papers

CardsList

129 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, down 25% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Investigating Multi-Cultural Value Selection Biases in LLMs

    Oct 22, 2026Siddhesh Pawar, Arnav Arora, Dustin Wright +2Cultural Bias in Language ModelsCross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

    University of Copenhagen · Aalborg University Copenhagen · Bocconi University

  2. WikiOriginQA: Automated Construction of a QA Dataset with Knowledge Origins for Analyzing Cultural Bias

    Oct 22, 2026Kento Haneda, Yosuke Kishinami, Ryo Fujii +2Cultural Knowledge in Language ModelsCultural Bias in Language Models

    Future Corporation · Tohoku University

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

    Oct 19, 2026Samee Arif, Furkan Danisman, Angana Borah +6Cultural Bias in Language ModelsCultural Knowledge in Language Models

  4. BanglaBBQ: A Bias Benchmark for Question Answering in the Bangladeshi Context

    Oct 17, 2026Sumit Anthony Gomes, Yasin Rahman, Taeeba Tasnia +1Cultural Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

  5. Cultural (In)Competence: Investigating Culture-Specific Stereotype Detection Capabilities of LLMs

    Oct 15, 2026Maximilian Spliethöver, Jannes Lötfering, Dominik Bachmann +4Social Bias in Language ModelsCultural Bias in Language Models

    Institute of Artificial Intelligence & L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover · Institute for Logic, Language & Computation, University of Amsterdam · Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University

  6. Knowing Is Not Telling: Identity Ossification in LLM Representations of Trans-border Communities

    Oct 8, 2026Minglu Sun, Lan Chen, Hang JiangCultural Bias in Language ModelsCultural Knowledge in Language Models

    Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA · The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

  7. CuBEs: Culturally-Situated Behavioral Evaluations and the Limitations of Culture-Blind LLM Judges

    Oct 2, 2026Hoda Ayad, Tanu Mitra, Abhishek MukherjiLLM EvaluationCross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

    University of Washington · Centific

  8. What Is Lost in Post-Training? Default Collapse and the Loss of In-Context Steerability Across Diverse Perspectives

    Oct 2, 2026Jessica Dierking, Itai Shapira, Niclas BoehmerLLM Post-TrainingCultural Bias in Language Models

    Hasso Plattner Institute University of Potsdam · Harvard University

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

    Sep 28, 2026Bushra Asseri, Abdulaziz AsseriMultilingual Language Model EvaluationCross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

    College of Engineering and Advanced Computing, Alfaisal University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia · Proxa.sa, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

  10. Evaluating Cultural Awareness of LLMs for Haitian Creole

    Sep 25, 2026Christelle Clervilsson, Yanzhu GuoCultural Knowledge in Language ModelsCultural Bias in Language Models

    Telecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France

  11. Cultural Divergence Preservation: Diagnosing Flattening and Caricature in LLM-Simulated Survey Populations

    Sep 24, 2026Yeeun Chae, Yewon Choi, Seunghyun Lee +1Cultural Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    Yonsei University · NAVER · Seoul National University Hospital

  12. GYROval: A Robust Benchmark for Cultural Value Orientation in Large Language Models

    Sep 16, 2026Alexander Didenko, Anna Shabanova, Vladislav Zapylikhin +2LLM EvaluationCross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

    Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, SKOLKOVO School of Management, Moscow · Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Tyumen · Institute of Business Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow

  13. Prompt Revision as a Source of Cultural Bias in Text-to-Image Systems

    Sep 10, 2026Aleksandra Urman, Elsa Lichtenegger, Salima Jaoua +7T2I GenerationCultural Bias in Language Models

    University of Zurich · University of Helsinki · ETH Zurich +1

  14. DiSCo: A Distribution-First Steering and Cultural Prior Evaluation Framework for Measuring Cultural Preference Bias in LLMs

    Sep 9, 2026Bhuvan Arora, Devesh Saraogi, Sravya Varada +1LLM PromptingCultural Bias in Language Models

    BITS Pilani, Pilani, India.

  15. Alignment by Stereotyping: How LLMs Sacrifice Individual Distinctiveness for Cultural Adaptation

    Sep 5, 2026Qishuai Zhong, Zongmin Li, Siqi Fan +1Personalized Language Model AlignmentDemographic Bias in Language Models

    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

  16. Cultural Misalignment in Large Language Models: Detection, Measurement, and Mitigation Through Targeted Fine-Tuning

    Sep 3, 2026Antoni Czolgowski, Abel IyaseleCultural Bias in Language ModelsSocial Bias in Language Models

    Masters in Data Science Program University of Colorado Boulder Boulder, CO 80309, USA · Department of Information Science University of Colorado Boulder Boulder, CO 80309, USA

  17. CHARM: Character Hallucination for Multicultural Role Play Benchmark

    Sep 1, 2026Sunkyung Han, Nahyeon Park, Gaeun Seo +2LLM EvaluationLarge Language Model-Based Role-Play Simulation

    Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea · Adobe Research, CA, USA

  18. Right Frame, Wrong Rule: Cultural Cues Expose the Financial Knowledge Gap They Were Meant to Close

    Sep 1, 2026Rania Elbadry, Ahmed Heakl, Saeed Almheiri +12Financial ServicesCultural Bias in Language Models

    ♠MBZUAI · ♢The University of Tokyo · §The Fin AI +4

  19. Aligned but Flattened: Analyzing the Trade-off between Cultural Alignment and Diversity in LLMs

    Sep 1, 2026Jingshen Zhang, Shaoyang Xu, Wenxuan ZhangLLM EvaluationCultural Alignment

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University · 2iNLP Lab, Singapore University of Technology and Design

  20. MemeBridge: A Dataset for Benchmarking and Mitigating the Bidirectional Cultural Gap in Meme Interpretation

    Aug 31, 2026Hangxiao Zhu, Suliu Qin, Zhuoyan Li +3Cultural Bias in Language ModelsCultural Knowledge in Language Models

    Texas A&M University · College Station, USA · Independent Researcher +4

  21. Evaluating and Mitigating Anti-LGBTQ Biases in German and Multilingual Language Models

    Aug 31, 2026Melina Morch, Daniel BraunMultilingual Language Model EvaluationSocial Bias in Language Models

    Marburg University · Computer Science · Cultural Data Studies +2

  22. CoCoA: Context-Conditional Cultural Alignment for Large Language Models

    Aug 30, 2026Kyungdon Lee, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter +2Cultural Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Debiasing

    Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea · Georgia Institute of Technology, GA, USA · University of Southern California, CA, USA

  23. Measurement Validity in LLM Cultural Alignment

    Aug 29, 2026An Duy Nguyen, Muhammad Aurangzeb AhmadCross-Cultural Language Model EvaluationCultural Bias in Language Models

    University of Washington · University of Washington Bothell

  24. Beyond Surface Cues: Disentangling Sociocultural Signals in Multilingual LLMs

    Aug 24, 2026Yuanjun Feng, Tanzhou Liu, Stefan Feuerriegel +1Cross-Cultural Language Model EvaluationCultural Bias in Language Models

    University of Lausanne, Switzerland · LMU Munich, Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Germany

  25. Epistemic Subordination: Generative AI and the Infrastructure of Knowledge

    Aug 19, 2026Gilad Abiri, Emanuel V. TowfighAI GovernanceCultural Bias in Language Models

  26. Every Token Counts: Exact Likert-Scale Distributions for Measuring LLM Attitudes and Biases

    Aug 11, 2026Davood Wadi, Mohsen Ghodrat, Matthew PhilpLLM EvaluationCultural Bias in Language Models

    McGill University · University Canada West · Marketing Management +1

  27. SurakshaEval: An Indic Safety Benchmark for Multilingual LLMs

    Aug 8, 2026Debopriyo Banerjee, Kapil Rajesh Kavitha, Angana Borah +11LLM Safety BenchmarksMultilingual Language Model Evaluation

    Inception · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · University of Michigan +4

  28. Critical Acclaim Orientation in Large Language Models: Evidence from Film Preference Elicitation

    Aug 7, 2026Jonghyun Jee, Aaron ShawLLM EvaluationCultural Bias in Language Models

    Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University

  29. Cultural Awareness is Represented but Not Decoded: Tracing Mythological Knowledge across 18 Open-Source LLMs

    Aug 3, 2026Iaroslav Chelombitko, Ekaterina Chelombitko, Mika HämäläinenMultilingual Language ModelsLLM Interpretability

    1DataSpike · 2Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki, Finland · 3Neapolis University Pafos, Paphos, Cyprus

  30. TreeProbe : A Tibetan Medicine Benchmark for Cultural Bias in LLMs

    Aug 1, 2026Jin Zhang, Linyu Li, Weili Jiang +7Cultural Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Peking University · Southwest Jiaotong University +1