Usage
from peft import PeftModelfrom transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer base = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B", torch_dtype="auto", device_map="auto")model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(base, "sameearif/CultureLens-Qwen-3.5-27B-SFT")tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B")
Training
LoRA of rank 16 with a scaling factor of 32 and a dropout of 0.05 on the attention and feed-forward projections of every layer.
Three epochs with AdamW, a learning rate of 1e-4, a batch of 16 examples, a linear warm-up over the first 5% of steps and cosine
decay. This is the checkpoint with the lowest validation loss, at step 700. training_config.json has the full settings.
Training uses 5,984 records from 67 countries. Eight countries are held out entirely: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Germany,
India, Indonesia, Japan and Russia.
Results
Percentage of open-ended answers judged aligned with the documented norm, averaged over two LLM judges. Columns give the
evidence shown with the country.
Table with columns: Seen: Country, + Value, + True norm, + Contra. norm, Unseen: Country, + Value, + True norm, + Contra. norm | Seen: Country | + Value | + True norm | + Contra. norm | Unseen: Country | + Value | + True norm | + Contra. norm |
|---|
| Untuned | 73.7 | 88.4 | 95.2 | 40.8 | 73.7 | 86.3 | 95.3 | 47.3 |
| SFT | 78.2 | 90.0 | 100.0 | 15.3 | 77.3 | 89.8 | 100.0 | 18.3 |
| SFT + CF | 76.8 | 91.7 | 90.0 | 92.4 |
Limits
- This adapter follows a contradictory norm more often than the untuned model. It learns to follow what the prompt states, so resistance to a false stated norm falls. Use the SFT + CF adapter when the prompt may contain incorrect cultural claims.
- The benchmark covers 75 countries in English and draws its norms from one source, the Cultural Atlas. A documented norm is a
common expectation, not a rule every person follows.
- Answers about a culture from this model are fallible and should not be treated as authoritative guidance.
Licence
The adapter follows the licence of its base model, the Apache 2.0, and is released for research use.
Citation
@misc{culturelens2026, title = {The Culture Within: Towards Mechanistic Understanding of Cultural Reasoning in LLMs}, author = {Arif, Samee and Danisman, Furkan and Borah, Angana and Lee, Honglak and Kong, Dehan and Logeswaran, Lajanugen and Lee, Moontae and Jin, Zhijing and Mihalcea, Rada}, year = {2026}}