Work

CuMA: Aligning LLMs with Sparse Cultural Values via Demographic-Aware Mixture of Adapters

Year: 2026

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) serve a global audience, alignment must transition from enforcing universal consensus to respecting cultural pluralism.We demonstrate that dense models, when forced to fit conflicting value distributions, suffer from Mean Collapse, converging to a generic average that fails to represent diverse groups.We attribute this to Cultural Sparsity, where gradient interference prevents dense parameters from spanning distinct cultural modes.To resolve this, we propose CUMA (Cultural Mixture of Adapters), a framework that frames alignment as a conditional capacity separation problem.By incorporating demographic-aware routing, CUMA internalizes a Latent Cultural Topology to explicitly disentangle conflicting gradients into specialized expert subspaces.Extensive evaluations on WorldValuesBench, Community Alignment, and PRISM demonstrate that CUMA achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs.Crucially, our analysis confirms that CUMA effectively mitigates mean collapse, preserving cultural diversity.Our code is available at https: //github.com/Throll/CuMA.

Source: Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1265