9 papers
VakyArth: Evaluating Pragmatic Competence in LLMs across Indic Languages
Usneek Singh, Poorvaja Veera Balaji Kumar, Parth Nanda +4
Real-world communication often requires pragmatic reasoning: interpreting meanings implied through context and cultural convention rather than stated literally. Existing pragmatic…
CoCoA: Context-Conditional Cultural Alignment for Large Language Models
Kyungdon Lee, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter +2
Large Language Models (LLMs) often favor Western-associated entities across cultural contexts. Conventional debiasing methods aim for uniform neutrality, but cultural bias mitigati…
Soft Token Alignment for Cross-Lingual Reasoning
Jiayi He, Jungsoo Park, Wei Xu +1
Multilingual large language models often produce inconsistent reasoning and answers for semantically equivalent prompts in different languages. Prior work suggests that intermediat…
Learning to Route Languages for Multilingual Policy Optimization
Geyang Guo, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji +2
Large language models~(LLMs) are trained on heterogeneous multilingual corpora, yet existing policy optimization methods often implicitly restrict each training question to a singl…
Flipping the Dialogue: Training and Evaluating User Language Models
Tarek Naous, Philippe Laban, Wei Xu +1
Conversations with LMs involve two participants: a human user leading the conversation, and an LM assistant responding to the user's request. To satisfy this specific role, LMs are…
Camellia: Benchmarking Cultural Biases in LLMs for Asian Languages
Tarek Naous, Anagha Savit, Carlos Rafael Catalan +17
As Large Language Models (LLMs) develop stronger multilingual capabilities, their sensitivity to culturally diverse entities becomes increasingly important. Prior work by Naous et…
CARE: Multilingual Human Preference Learning for Cultural Awareness
Geyang Guo, Tarek Naous, Hiromi Wakaki +4
Language Models (LMs) are typically tuned with human preferences to produce helpful responses, but the impact of preference tuning on the ability to handle culturally diverse queri…
What are Foundation Models Cooking in the Post-Soviet World?
Anton Lavrouk, Tarek Naous, Alan Ritter +1
The culture of the Post-Soviet states is complex, shaped by a turbulent history that continues to influence current events. In this study, we investigate the Post-Soviet cultural f…
On The Origin of Cultural Biases in Language Models: From Pre-training Data to Linguistic Phenomena
Tarek Naous, Wei Xu
Language Models (LMs) have been shown to exhibit a strong preference towards entities associated with Western culture when operating in non-Western languages. In this paper, we aim…