Cultural fine-tuning has become the de facto paradigm for building culture-aware large language models (LLMs), yet existing optimization exclusively for alignment scores provides an incomplete portrait of cultural fidelity by systematically obscuring inherent cultural diversity. This unidimensional evaluation lens prompts a fundamental question: do models genuinely perceive distinct cultural nuances, or do they merely memorize dominant cultural values? To address this, we propose a synergistic evaluation framework that jointly formalizes cultural alignment and diversity. Through extensive benchmarking of six mainstream LLMs on the World Values Survey, this framework uncovers a systematic and critical trade-off: the pursuit of cultural alignment consistently incurs an acute expense of diversity, leading to severe "cultural flattening." Investigating this behavioral shift, we demonstrate that these superficial alignment gains stem from models artificially anchoring to dominant majorities, converging onto a monolithic response pattern that wipes out the heterogeneous distributions inherent to human groups. Crucially, our mechanistic analysis suggests that this diversity collapse is not merely a behavioral anomaly but more likely a structural consequence of the low-rank bias inherent in neural network optimization. Therefore, our findings expose the limitations of current post-training paradigms and call for a shift toward alignment objectives that preserve cross-cultural pluralism.

Multicultural multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed in globally diverse settings, where different agents are grounded in different cultural backgrounds. Existing cultural evaluation focuses on value alignment: how closely a single agent matches a target culture. Yet alignment is a per-agent property and cannot reveal whether a system, taken as a whole, preserves the cultural plurality it is meant to represent. We propose value diversity as a system-level evaluation axis for multicultural agent systems, defined through the dissimilarity between culturally conditioned agents’ responses on a shared value survey. Using the World Values Survey, we evaluate 19 cultures and 18 backbone models across a wide range of system configurations. We find that diversity is largely uncorrelated with alignment, indicating that the two capture complementary system properties, and that current multicultural agent systems fall substantially below human societies in value diversity. Mixed-backbone systems narrow this gap but do not close it, and the gap persists across culture compositions and agent scales. Social interaction further erodes diversity by driving agents toward consensus, and a participatory budgeting case study shows that this homogenization narrows the breadth of collective decision-making. Together, our results establish value diversity as a distinct evaluation axis for multicultural multi-agent systems and reveal a persistent homogenization tendency in current LLM-based societies. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/iNLP-Lab/MultiAgent-Diversity.

Large language models demonstrate limited capability in proficiency-controlled sentence simplification, particularly when simplifying across large readability levels. We propose a framework that decomposes complex simplifications into manageable steps through dynamic path planning, semantic-aware exemplar selection, and chain-of-thought generation with conversation history for coherent reasoning. Evaluation on five languages across two benchmarks shows our approach improves simplification effectiveness while reducing computational steps. Human evaluation confirms the fundamental trade-off between simplification effectiveness and meaning preservation. Notably, even human annotators struggle to agree on semantic preservation judgments, highlighting the inherent complexity of this task. Our work shows that while step-by-step simplification improves control, preserving semantic fidelity during extensive simplification remains an open challenge.

“This paper introduces DualReward, a novel reinforcement learning framework for automatic dis-tractor generation in cloze tests. Unlike conventional approaches that rely primarily on super-vised learning or static generative models, our method employs a dual reward structure with adaptive scaling that differentiates between human-created gold standard distractors and model-generated candidates. The framework dynamically adjusts reward signal intensity based on model performance and confidence. We evaluate our approach on both passage-level (CLOTH-F) and sentence-level (MCQ) cloze test datasets, demonstrating consistent improvements overstate-of-the-art baselines. Experimental results show that our adaptive reward scaling mechanism provides modest but consistent benefits on homogeneous datasets (CLOTH-F) and more substantial improvements (3.48-3.86% in P@1) on diverse, cross-domain data (MCQ), suggest-ing its particular effectiveness for handling varied question types and domains. Our work offers a flexible framework that effectively balances learning from reliable human examples while exploring novel, high-quality distractors for automated test generation.”

Multi-level sentence simplification generates simplified sentences with varying language proficiency levels. We propose Label Confidence Weighted Learning (LCWL), a novel approach that incorporates a label confidence weighting scheme in the training loss of the encoder-decoder model, setting it apart from existing confidence-weighting methods primarily designed for classification. Experimentation on English grade-level simplification dataset shows that LCWL outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised baselines. Fine-tuning the LCWL model on in-domain data and combining with Symmetric Cross Entropy (SCE) consistently delivers better simplifications compared to strong supervised methods. Our results highlight the effectiveness of label confidence weighting techniques for text simplification tasks with encoder-decoder architectures.

“This system report presents our approaches and results for the Chinese Essay Fluency Evaluation (CEFE) task at CCL-2024. For Track 1, we optimized predictions for challenging fine-grained error types using binary classification models and trained coarse-grained models on the Chinese Learner 4W corpus. In Track 2, we enhanced performance by constructing a pseudo-dataset with multiple error types per sentence. For Track 3, where we achieved first place, we generated fluency-rated pseudo-data via back-translation for pretraining and used an NSP-based strategy with Symmetric Cross Entropy loss to capture context and mitigate long dependencies. Our methods effectively address key challenges in Chinese Essay Fluency Evaluation.”

“Chinese sentence simplification faces challenges due to the lack of large-scale labeledparallel corpora and the prevalence of idioms. To address these challenges, we pro-pose Readability-guided Idiom-aware Sentence Simplification (RISS), a novel frameworkthat combines data augmentation techniques. RISS introduces two key components: (1)Readability-guided Paraphrase Selection (RPS), a method for mining high-quality sen-tence pairs, and (2) Idiom-aware Simplification (IAS), a model that enhances the compre-hension and simplification of idiomatic expressions. By integrating RPS and IAS usingmulti-stage and multi-task learning strategies, RISS outperforms previous state-of-the-artmethods on two Chinese sentence simplification datasets. Furthermore, RISS achievesadditional improvements when fine-tuned on a small labeled dataset. Our approachdemonstrates the potential for more effective and accessible Chinese text simplification.”