CoCoA: Context-Conditional Cultural Alignment for Large Language Models
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2608.29492 (cs)
[Submitted on 30 Aug 2026]
Title:CoCoA: Context-Conditional Cultural Alignment for Large Language Models
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Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) often favor Western-associated entities across cultural contexts. Conventional debiasing methods aim for uniform neutrality, but cultural bias mitigation demands context-conditional behavior, preferring culturally appropriate entities when cultural cues are present and remaining neutral when they are absent. We propose CoCoA (Context-Conditional Cultural Alignment), a framework that learns this behavior through dual-context training on the same entity pairs under contexts with and without cultural cues. CoCoA combines a contrastive alignment objective with calibration and drift regularization, optimized through goal-aware gradient reconciliation. We evaluate CoCoA on CAMeL and Camellia, two entity-centric cultural bias benchmarks, across ten language settings and four LLMs. CoCoA reduces the Cultural Bias Score from 43 to 24 on average while maintaining near-neutral preferences at 50.2, with minimal impact on general performance across five standard benchmarks. These findings highlight that effective cultural alignment requires context-conditional modeling rather than uniform debiasing, and establish a new direction for mitigating entity-centric cultural bias in LLMs.
| Comments: | Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026. 22 pages, 4 figures, 19 tables |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.29492 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.29492v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29492
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled CoCoA: Context-Conditional Cultural Alignment for Large Language Models, by Kyungdon Lee and 4 other authors
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