AINeutralarXiv – CS AI · 5h ago6/10
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The Masked Advantage: Uncovering Local-Language Access to Cultural Knowledge in LLMs
Researchers developed a framework separating language proficiency from cultural knowledge access in large language models across 13 locales and 80 models. The study reveals that while English outperforms local languages on culture-agnostic questions, local languages consistently show advantages for accessing culture-specific knowledge once proficiency gaps are controlled for. This finding challenges the assumption that weaker local-language LLM performance indicates weaker cultural knowledge.