CAReDiO: Enhancing Cultural Alignment of LLM via Representativeness and Distinctiveness Guided Data Optimization

As Large Language Models (LLMs) more deeply integrate into human life across various regions, aligning them with pluralistic cultures is crucial for improving user engagement and mitigating cultural conflicts. For this purpose, recently, different culture-specific corpora have been carefully curated, either synthesized or manually annotated. Nevertheless, inspired by culture theories, we identify two key challenges faced by these datasets: (1) Representativeness: These corpora fail to fully capture the target culture's core characteristics, causing insufficient cultural coverage with redundancy; (2) Distinctiveness: They struggle to distinguish the unique nuances of a given culture from shared patterns across other relevant ones, hindering precise cultural modelling. To handle these challenges, we introduce CAReDiO, a novel data optimization framework, which alternatively refines culture-sensitive questions and responses according to information-theoretic objectives in an in-context optimization manner, enhancing the cultural informativeness and distinguishability of constructed data. Extensive experiments on 15 distinct cultures demonstrate that CAReDiO can create high-quality data with richer cultural information and enable efficient alignment of small open-source or large proprietary LLMs with as few as 200 training samples, consistently outperforming previous datasets in both multi-choice and open-ended cultural benchmarks.