Cultural Knowledge in Language Models

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This field studies whether language models can understand and use knowledge tied to particular communities, languages, regions, and historical contexts—not just recall cultural facts. Researchers test this with multilingual question answering, pragmatic dialogue, proverb and metaphor tasks, and cultural-heritage or meme images, often using native-speaker judgments. Methods include retrieval-augmented generation, culturally targeted fine-tuning, activation steering, and mechanistic interpretability. Models often perform unevenly across cultures and languages, and may represent relevant knowledge without applying it; the central challenge is improving cultural grounding without flattening differences or reinforcing stereotypes.

Latest papers

132 papers18 papers in the last four weeks, down 22% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Culturally uneven urban perception in large language models
Apr 21, 2026Rong Zhao, Wanqi Liu, Zhizhou Sha +3VLM Evaluation Social Bias in Language Models
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL, London, UK · Department of Computer Science, UT Austin, Austin, TX, USA · School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
CulturALL: Benchmarking Multilingual and Multicultural Competence of LLMs on Grounded Tasks
Apr 21, 2026Peiqin Lin, Chenyang Lyu, Wenjiang Luo +22Multilingual Language Model Evaluation LLM Evaluation
Alibaba Group · Beijing Language and Culture University · LMU Munich +6
AlignCultura: Towards Culturally Aligned Large Language Models?
Apr 21, 2026Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Mark Dras, Usman NaseemCross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Cultural Alignment
School of Computing, Macquarie University, Australia
Do LLMs Use Cultural Knowledge Without Being Told? A Multilingual Evaluation of Implicit Pragmatic Adaptation
Apr 20, 2026Mehwish Nasim, Sanjeevan Selvaganapathy, Neel Ganapathi Sabhahit +6Multilingual Language Models Multilingual Language Model Evaluation
1Network Analysis and Social Influence Modelling (NASIM) Lab · 3Computational Social Science & Systems Analysis University of Münster · School of Computing Macquarie University
Jupiter-N Technical Report
Apr 19, 2026George DraysonLLM Alignment Cultural Alignment
Locai Labs, University College London
Appear2Meaning: A Cross-Cultural Benchmark for Structured Cultural Metadata Inference from Images
Apr 8, 2026Yuechen Jiang, Enze Zhang, Md Mohsinul Kabir +4Cultural Knowledge in Language Models VLM Evaluation
University of Manchester Manchester, UK · School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University Wuhan, Hubei, China · Getty Conservation Institute Los Angeles, CA, USA
ValueGround: Evaluating Culture-Conditioned Visual Value Grounding in MLLMs
Apr 7, 2026Zhipin Wang, Christoph Leiter, Christian Frey +3Cultural Knowledge in Language Models VLM Evaluation
University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN), Germany
Metaphors We Compute By: A Computational Audit of Cultural Translation vs. Thinking in LLMs
Apr 6, 2026Yuan Chang, Jiaming Qu, Zhu LiCultural Bias in Language Models Cultural Knowledge in Language Models
Meta, Burlingame, CA · Amazon, Seattle, WA
Cultural Authenticity: Comparing LLM Cultural Representations to Native Human Expectations
Apr 3, 2026Erin MacMurray van Liemt, Aida Davani, Sinchana Kumbale +2Cultural Alignment Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation
Google Research, USA · Google, USA
Pragmatics Meets Culture: Culturally-adapted Artwork Description Generation and Evaluation
Apr 2, 2026Lingjun Zhao, Dayeon Ki, Marine Carpuat +1Cultural Knowledge in Language Models Text Generation
Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
GaelEval: Benchmarking LLM Performance for Scottish Gaelic
Apr 2, 2026Peter Devine, William Lamb, Beatrice Alex +5Multilingual Language Model Evaluation LLM Evaluation
University of Edinburgh · Lancaster University · University of Cardiff +2
Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology
Mar 31, 2026Cody Kommers, Ruth Ahnert, Maria Antoniak +35Generative AI Evaluation Cultural Knowledge in Language Models
The Alan Turing Institute · Queen Mary University of London · University of Colorado +27
CiQi-Agent: Aligning Vision, Tools and Aesthetics in Multimodal Agent for Cultural Reasoning on Chinese Porcelains
Mar 30, 2026Wenhan Wang, Zhixiang Zhou, Zhongtian Ma +8Cultural Heritage Cultural Knowledge in Language Models
Shanghai Innovation Institute · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Shaanxi Academy of Cultural Relics Conservation
Toward Culturally Grounded Natural Language Processing
Mar 27, 2026Sina Bagheri NezhadCross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Cultural Knowledge in Language Models
Independent Researcher, Seattle, WA, USA
IslamicMMLU: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Islamic Knowledge
Mar 24, 2026Ali Abdelaal, Mohammed Nader Al Haffar, Mahmoud Fawzi +1LLM Evaluation Cultural Knowledge in Language Models
The University of Edinburgh
Steering LLMs for Culturally Localized Generation
Mar 24, 2026Simran Khanuja, Hongbin Liu, Shujian Zhang +4Cultural Knowledge in Language Models Cultural Bias in Language Models
Carnegie Mellon University · Google DeepMind
KMMMU: Evaluation of Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding in Korean Language and Context
Mar 18, 2026Nahyun Lee, Guijin Son, Hyunwoo Ko +4Multimodal Model Evaluation Multimodal Understanding
Chung-Ang University · HAE-RAE · Seoul National University +2
Information Asymmetry across Language Varieties: A Case Study on Cantonese-Mandarin and Bavarian-German QA
Mar 16, 2026Renhao Pei, Siyao Peng, Verena Blaschke +2Multilingual QA Cultural Knowledge in Language Models
MaiNLP, Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Germany · ELLIS Institute Finland +1
The Human Condition as Reflected in Contemporary Large Language Models
Mar 15, 2026W. Russell NeumanCultural Knowledge in Language Models
New York University
SommBench: Assessing Sommelier Expertise of Language Models
Mar 12, 2026William Brach, Tomas Bedej, Jacob Nielsen +10Multilingual Language Model Evaluation LLM Grounding
Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia · sommify, Helsinki, Finland · University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
AdaCultureSafe: Adaptive Cultural Safety Grounded by Cultural Knowledge in Large Language Models
Mar 9, 2026Hankun Kang, Di Lin, Zhirong Liao +6Language Model Safety Evaluation Cultural Knowledge in Language Models
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China · Tsinghua University, China · Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, China
The Third Ambition: Artificial Intelligence and the Science of Human Behavior
Mar 7, 2026W. Russell Neuman, Chad ColemanComputational Social Science Cultural Knowledge in Language Models
New York University
Taiwan Safety Benchmark and Breeze Guard: Toward Trustworthy AI for Taiwanese Mandarin
Mar 7, 2026Po-Chun Hsu, Meng-Hsi Chen, Tsu Ling Chao +2LLM Safety Language Model Safety Evaluation
MediaTek Research · National Taiwan University
FLANS at SemEval-2026 Task 7: RAG with Open-Sourced Smaller LLMs for Everyday Knowledge Across Diverse Languages and Cultures
Mar 2, 2026Liliia Bogdanova, Shiran Sun, Lifeng Han +2Multilingual QA Knowledge Augmentation for Language Models
Insilico Medicine AI Limited · University of Groningen · LIACS, Leiden University +1
A Unified Framework to Quantify Cultural Intelligence of AI
Mar 1, 2026Sunipa Dev, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Rutledge Chin Feman +16Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation Generative AI Evaluation
Google Research.
Voices of Civilizations: A Multilingual QA Benchmark for Global Music Understanding
Feb 28, 2026Shangda Wu, Ziya Zhou, Yongyi Zang +4Music Understanding Audio-Language Model Evaluation
Independent Researcher · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
TARAZ: Persian Short-Answer Question Benchmark for Cultural Evaluation of Language Models
Feb 26, 2026Reihaneh Iranmanesh, Saeedeh Davoudi, Pasha Abrishamchian +2Cultural Knowledge in Language Models Cross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation
IR Lab, Computer Science Department Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
Mind the Gap in Cultural Alignment: Task-Aware Culture Management for Large Language Models
Feb 25, 2026Binchi Zhang, Xujiang Zhao, Jundong Li +2Cultural Alignment Cultural Knowledge in Language Models
University of Virginia · NEC Laboratories America
VIRAASAT: Traversing Novel Paths for Indian Cultural Reasoning
Feb 20, 2026Harshul Raj Surana, Arijit Maji, Aryan Vats +3Cultural Knowledge in Language Models Multi-Hop QA
AI Institute, University of South Carolina, USA · Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India
Unmasking the Factual-Conceptual Gap in Persian Language Models
Feb 19, 2026Alireza Sakhaeirad, Ali Ma'manpoosh, Arshia HemmatCultural Knowledge in Language Models Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models
EPFL · University of Oxford

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Culturally uneven urban perception in large language models

Rong Zhao, Wanqi Liu, Zhizhou Sha, Nanxi Su+2

Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL, London, UK · Department of Computer Science, UT Austin, Austin, TX, USA · School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

VLM Evaluation Social Bias in Language Models Cultural Bias in Language Models Cultural Knowledge in Language Models

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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to describe and evaluate cities, yet the cultural structure of their urban judgments remains understudied. Here we introduce a measurement framework for testing whether LLM-based urban perception is culturally neutral, using a globally stratified street-view image dataset. Open-ended descriptions and structured scores generated by three frontier multimodal models all show that the neutral baseline lies closer to regional framings associated with Europe and North America than to other cultural framings. Comparisons between AI and human urban perception further show that prompting can move AI responses closer to specific regional human descriptions, but fails to recover the variety and diversity of human responses, flattening observed demographic patterns and introducing sentiment-based self-favouring bias. These results indicate a systematic risk in treating AI as a neutral tool for urban tasks, especially when model outputs are used to compare, evaluate or represent cities across cultural contexts.