Mind the Gap in Cultural Alignment: Task-Aware Culture Management for Large Language Models
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in culturally sensitive real-world tasks.However, existing cultural alignment approaches fail to align LLMs' broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks and suffer from cross-culture interference.We propose CultureManager, a novel pipeline for task-specific cultural alignment.CultureManager synthesizes task-aware cultural data in line with target task formats, grounded in culturally relevant web search results.To prevent conflicts between cultural norms, it manages multiculture knowledge learned in separate adapters with a culture router that selects the appropriate one to apply.Experiments across five national cultures and ten culture-sensitive tasks show consistent improvements over promptbased and fine-tuning baselines.Our results demonstrate the necessity of task adaptation and modular culture management for effective cultural alignment.
Institutions: University of Virginia, NEC (United States)
Language: English
Topic: Topic Modeling
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166798393