Building agentic systems that can autonomously self-improve from experience is a longstanding goal of AI. Large language models (LLMs) today primarily self-improve via two mechanisms: self-reflection for context updates, and reinforcement learning (RL) for weight updates. In this work, we propose Evolutionary System Prompt Learning (E-SPL), a method for jointly improving a model's experiential context and its weights. In each RL iteration, E-SPL samples trajectories under multiple system prompts in parallel, then uses them to jointly update the weights with RL and evolve the system prompts with self-reflection. E-SPL encourages a natural division between procedural knowledge in weights and interpretable declarative knowledge in system prompts. Most notably, in an easy-to-hard generalization setting (AIME $\rightarrow$ BeyondAIME), E-SPL improves RL success rate from 38.8% $\rightarrow$ 45.1%. E-SPL also improves RL on AIME 2025 (56.3% $\rightarrow$ 60.6%), HMMT 2025 (50.0% $\rightarrow$ 52.7%), and agentic search (44.2% $\rightarrow$ 48.6% on gpt-oss-120b). Across all settings, E-SPL outperforms both RL-only and evolution-only baselines, demonstrating that weight updates and context updates are deeply synergistic and can together yield gains in generalization that neither achieves alone. Code is available at https://github.com/LunjunZhang/E-SPL.
My Chiffon Nguyen, Tianyi Hu, Vinod Anbalagan, Henry Gagnier, Pouya Sadeghi, Farah Abdou, Tidor-Vlad Pricope, Diego MMS Oliveira 等 164 位作者
As LLMs expand their language coverage, evaluating how well they understand and represent diverse cultures becomes increasingly important. However, many benchmarks remain English-centric, with limited cultural coverage and a focus on factual knowledge over its application in real-world cultural contexts. We propose CulturalRiddles, a benchmark of original, culturally grounded riddles created entirely by humans through a participatory community effort, spanning 62 cultures (45 countries, 51 languages). These riddles are deeply rooted in their respective cultures and require abductive and compositional reasoning, alongside detailed factual and social knowledge, language skills, and an understanding of culturally specific associations. We benchmark 28 LLM configurations using both automatic and large-scale human evaluation. Even frontier models achieve at most 22% accuracy in some communities. We publicly release all artifacts alongside an open contribution process to expand the benchmark's linguistic and cultural coverage.
Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Zhengyuan Liu Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, Xiaoyuan Yi Microsoft Research, Jing Yao Microsoft, Xing Xie Microsoft Research Asia, Nancy F. Chen A*STAR, Roy Ka-Wei Lee Singapore University of Technology and Design
Despite their global prevalence, many Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned to a monolithic, often Western-centric set of values. This paper investigates the more challenging task of fine-grained value alignment: examining whether LLMs can emulate the distinct cultural values of demographic subgroups. Using Singapore as a case study and the World Values Survey (WVS), we examine the value landscape and show that even state-of-the-art models like GPT-4.1 achieve only 57.4% accuracy in predicting subgroup modal preferences. We construct a dataset of over 20,000 samples to train and evaluate a range of models. We demonstrate that simple fine-tuning on structured numerical preferences yields substantial gains, improving accuracy on unseen, out-of-distribution subgroups by an average of 17.4%. These gains partially transfer to open-ended generation. However, we find significant pre-existing performance biases, where models better emulate young, male, Chinese, and Christian personas. Furthermore, while fine-tuning improves average performance, it widens the disparity between subgroups when measured by distance-aware metrics. Our work offers insights into the limits and fairness implications of subgroup-level cultural alignment.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Weihua Zheng, Zhengyuan Liu Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, Tanmoy Chakraborty Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Weiwen Xu Alibaba Group, Xiaoxue Gao, Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Bowei Zou A*STAR, Chang Liu Shanghai University of Finance and Economics 等 35 位作者
The global deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) underscores the urgent need to evaluate their cultural alignment. However, assessing genuine “cultural awareness” across modalities (text, vision, speech) and languages remains a significant challenge. To comprehensively investigate this domain, we propose MMAC, a systematic framework that encompasses a tri-modally aligned cultural benchmark creation pipeline and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities, evaluate cross-lingual and cross-modal consistency, and verify cultural knowledge generalization and grounding validity. Given the prevailing Western cultural bias in current models, we focus on 8 Asian countries as our dataset foundation to more acutely reveal potential cultural deficiencies in LLMs. Our dataset, MMAC-bench, features 27,000 human-curated questions across 10 languages. Crucially, it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech, enabling direct cross-modal transfer tests. Each question consists of multiple-choice options accompanied by open-ended generated explanations, where 79% require multi-step reasoning grounded in cultural context, moving beyond simple memorization. We probe the causes of modal divergence, offering insights into fostering culturally robust MLLMs.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表