Cultural Authenticity: Comparing LLM Cultural Representations to Native Human Expectations
Cultural representation in Large Language Model (LLM) outputs has primarily been evaluated through the proxies of cultural diversity and factual accuracy. However, a crucial gap remains in assessing cultural alignment: the degree to which generated content mirrors how native populations perceive and prioritize their own cultural facets. In this paper, we introduce a human-centered framework to evaluate the alignment of LLM generations with local expectations. First, we establish a human-derived ground-truth baseline of importance vectors, called Cultural Importance Vectors based on an induced set of culturally significant facets from open-ended survey responses collected across nine countries. Next, we introduce a method to compute model-derived Cultural Representation Vectors of an LLM based on a syntactically diversified prompt-set and apply it to three frontier LLMs (Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Haiku). Our investigation of the alignment between the human-derived Cultural Importance and model-derived Cultural Representations reveals a Western-centric calibration for some of the models where alignment decreases as a country's cultural distance from the US increases. Furthermore, we identify highly correlated, systemic error signatures ($ρ> 0.97$) across all models, which over-index on some cultural markers while neglecting the deep-seated social and value-based priorities of users. Our approach moves beyond simple diversity metrics toward evaluating the fidelity of AI-generated content in authentically capturing the nuanced hierarchies of global cultures.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
CultureTalk-ID: A Multi-Task Dialogue Benchmark for Cultural Commonsense in Indonesian Local Languages
Culture is lived through conversation, yet existing Indonesian cultural commonsense benchmarks evaluate LLMs on short and isolated prompts, stripping away the dialogic context in which cultural nuances actually surface. …
Machine TranslationCulinary Class Wars: Evaluating LLMs using ASH in Cuisine Transfer Task
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in various creative domains, including culinary arts. However, many LLMs still struggle to deliver the desired level of culinary creativity, especially when t…
Recipe GenerationCross-Cultural Bias in Mel-Scale Representations: Evidence and Alternatives from Speech and Music
Modern audio systems universally employ mel-scale representations derived from 1940s Western psychoacoustic studies, potentially encoding cultural biases that create systematic performance disparities. We present a compr…
Acoustic Scene ClassificationSpeech RecognitionFine-Tuning LLMs for Low-Resource Dialect Translation: The Case of Lebanese
This paper examines the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in translating the low-resource Lebanese dialect, focusing on the impact of culturally authentic data versus larger translated datasets. We compare th…
TranslationDebiasing Text-to-Image Evaluation via Implicit Cultural Alignment Reward Modeling
As Text-to-Image (T2I) systems rapidly advance, evaluating the cultural authenticity of synthesized content has become increasingly important for fair and trustworthy generative AI. Existing T2I evaluation metrics and mu…
Visual Question AnsweringReinforcement LearningText Generation