arXiv:2605.28543v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: LLMs often default to equal treatment across cultural groups, even though context warrants differentiation: this is a lack of difference awareness. Using mechanistic interpretability and a factorial design on the N4 cultural appropriation benchmark from Wang et al. (2025), we identify 2-3 mid-layer attention heads per model that contribute causally to cultural binding across eight models (base and instruct versions of four architectures). Cultural binding is the process of associating a cultural item with its related identity. Knockout of the identity-to-item edges on these heads lowers the binding strength by 9-23%. The identified heads transfer from instruct to base models, suggesting that cultural binding is created during pre-training. An $\alpha$-scaling shows a graded dose-response. Moderate amplification steering at generation ($\alpha = 2-3$) increases cultural differentiation accuracy by 1-3 pp while leaving reasoning on culturally neutral questions mostly intact. A knowledge probing task shows that models know 3-6 times more than they act upon, indicating that the bottleneck lies in routing and not knowledge.
Abstract: LLMs often default to equal treatment across cultural groups, even though context warrants differentiation: this is a lack of difference awareness. Using mechanistic interpretability and a factorial design on the N4 cultural appropriation benchmark from Wang et al. (2025), we identify 2-3 mid-layer attention heads per model that contribute causally to cultural binding across eight models (base and instruct versions of four architectures). Cultural binding is the process of associating a cultural item with its related identity. Knockout of the identity-to-item edges on these heads lowers the binding strength by 9-23%. The identified heads transfer from instruct to base models, suggesting that cultural binding is created during pre-training. An $\alpha$-scaling shows a graded dose-response. Moderate amplification steering at generation ($\alpha = 2-3$) increases cultural differentiation accuracy by 1-3 pp while leaving reasoning on culturally neutral questions mostly intact. A knowledge probing task shows that models know 3-6 times more than they act upon, indicating that the bottleneck lies in routing and not knowledge.
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