Mind the Gap in Cultural Alignment: Task-Aware Culture Management for Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22475v1
• Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:27:18 GMT
• Title: Mind the Gap in Cultural Alignment: Task-Aware Culture Management for Large Language Models
• Authors: Binchi Zhang, Xujiang Zhao, Jundong Li, Haifeng Chen, Zhengzhang Chen,
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in culturally sensitive real-world tasks.<n>Existing cultural alignment approaches fail to align LLMs' broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks.<n>We propose CultureManager, a novel pipeline for task-specific cultural alignment.
• Score: 78.19037585302475
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• 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 multi-culture knowledge learned in separate adapters with a culture router that selects the appropriate one to apply. Experiments across ten national cultures and culture-sensitive tasks show consistent improvements over prompt-based and fine-tuning baselines. Our results demonstrate the necessity of task adaptation and modular culture management for effective cultural alignment.

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