Cultural Palette: Pluralising Culture Alignment via Multi-agent Palette

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission2298 Authors

Keywords: Large Language Model, values and culture, Culture Alignment

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) face challenges in aligning with diverse cultural values despite their remarkable performance in generation, which stems from inherent monocultural biases and difficulties in capturing nuanced cultural semantics. Existing methods struggle to adapt to unknown culture after fine-tuning. Inspired by cultural geography across five continents, we propose Cultural Palette, a multi-agent framework that redefines cultural alignment as an adaptive "color-blending" process for country-specific adaptation. Our approach harnesses cultural geography across five continents through three key steps: First, we synthesize the Pentachromatic Cultural Palette Dataset using GPT-4o, refining continental-level dialogues with Hofstede's cultural dimensions to establish foundational cultural representations. Second, five continent-level alignment agents form specialized cultural communities that generate region-specific draft responses. Third, a Meta Agent employs Cultural MoErges to dynamically blend these cultural "colors" through attention-gated parameter merging, akin to mixing pigments on a palette, resolving conflicts while preserving cultural nuances to produce the final culturally-aligned response. Extensive experiments across various countries demonstrate that \textit{Cultural Palette} surpasses existing baselines in cultural alignment.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Human-AI Interaction/Cooperation and Human-Centric NLP

Research Area Keywords: Large Language Model,values and culture,Culture Alignment

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Data resources

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 2298