Mitigating Cross-Lingual Cultural Inconsistencies in LLMs via Consensus-Driven Preference Optimisation

Abstract

Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) often answer culturally ambiguous questions inconsistently across languages, even for a fixed user persona -- e.g., Shakespeare in English but Cervantes in Spanish for the same British user. To robustly quantify this Cross-lingual Cultural Inconsistency, we introduce Singleton Fleiss's $\kappa_S$, a metric mathematically resilient to hallucinations. For mitigation, we propose Cross-lingual Cultural Consistent Preference Optimisation (C-3PO), a consensus-driven alignment framework. C-3PO raises $\kappa_S$ by 0.07--0.10 over unaligned models, above every prompting and representation steering baseline averaged across personas, whilst largely preserving explicit user identities, cultural neutrality and intrinsic cultural knowledge; where it does not, a soft-consensus variant recovers most of the cost. Although trained only on multiple-choice questions, C-3PO also improves consistency in open-ended generation. Empirical evaluations demonstrate this inconsistency is more pronounced for lower-resource languages like Indonesian and Persian. Finally, early decoding of intermediate layers reveals that MLLMs implicitly personalise outputs towards the prompt language's stereotypical culture as forward-pass representations stabilise.