An Evaluation of Cultural Value Alignment in LLM

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Sukiennik, Nicholas, Gao, Chen, Xu, Fengli, Li, Yong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Sukiennik, Nicholas
Gao, Chen
Xu, Fengli
Li, Yong
author_facet Sukiennik, Nicholas
Gao, Chen
Xu, Fengli
Li, Yong
contents LLMs as intelligent agents are being increasingly applied in scenarios where human interactions are involved, leading to a critical concern about whether LLMs are faithful to the variations in culture across regions. Several works have investigated this question in various ways, finding that there are biases present in the cultural representations of LLM outputs. To gain a more comprehensive view, in this work, we conduct the first large-scale evaluation of LLM culture assessing 20 countries' cultures and languages across ten LLMs. With a renowned cultural values questionnaire and by carefully analyzing LLM output with human ground truth scores, we thoroughly study LLMs' cultural alignment across countries and among individual models. Our findings show that the output over all models represents a moderate cultural middle ground. Given the overall skew, we propose an alignment metric, revealing that the United States is the best-aligned country and GLM-4 has the best ability to align to cultural values. Deeper investigation sheds light on the influence of model origin, prompt language, and value dimensions on cultural output. Specifically, models, regardless of where they originate, align better with the US than they do with China. The conclusions provide insight to how LLMs can be better aligned to various cultures as well as provoke further discussion of the potential for LLMs to propagate cultural bias and the need for more culturally adaptable models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_08863
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Evaluation of Cultural Value Alignment in LLM
Sukiennik, Nicholas
Gao, Chen
Xu, Fengli
Li, Yong
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
LLMs as intelligent agents are being increasingly applied in scenarios where human interactions are involved, leading to a critical concern about whether LLMs are faithful to the variations in culture across regions. Several works have investigated this question in various ways, finding that there are biases present in the cultural representations of LLM outputs. To gain a more comprehensive view, in this work, we conduct the first large-scale evaluation of LLM culture assessing 20 countries' cultures and languages across ten LLMs. With a renowned cultural values questionnaire and by carefully analyzing LLM output with human ground truth scores, we thoroughly study LLMs' cultural alignment across countries and among individual models. Our findings show that the output over all models represents a moderate cultural middle ground. Given the overall skew, we propose an alignment metric, revealing that the United States is the best-aligned country and GLM-4 has the best ability to align to cultural values. Deeper investigation sheds light on the influence of model origin, prompt language, and value dimensions on cultural output. Specifically, models, regardless of where they originate, align better with the US than they do with China. The conclusions provide insight to how LLMs can be better aligned to various cultures as well as provoke further discussion of the potential for LLMs to propagate cultural bias and the need for more culturally adaptable models.
title An Evaluation of Cultural Value Alignment in LLM
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08863