Lost in Cultural Translation: Do LLMs Struggle with Math Across Cultural Contexts?

Researchers found that large language models experience accuracy drops of 0.3% to 5.9% when math problems are presented in unfamiliar cultural contexts, even when the underlying mathematical logic remains identical. Testing 14 models across culturally adapted variants of the GSM8K benchmark reveals that LLM mathematical reasoning is not culturally neutral, with errors stemming from both reasoning failures and calculation mistakes.