Cultural Awareness is Represented but Not Decoded: Tracing Mythological Knowledge across 18 Open-Source LLMs

Abstract:Open-source LLMs reliably name Zeus, Jupiter, and Thor, but recover their counterparts in less-represented traditions like Finnish, Slavic, Egyptian, or Chinese mythology far less consistently. We ask where inside the model this cultural default is produced. On a parallel cross-cultural substrate of Thompson-motif entities, we instrument 18 open-source LLMs from 8 architecture families with linear probing, logit lens, activation patching, and output extraction. The residual stream cleanly distinguishes cultures, well above a name-string baseline, yet the decoder collapses culturally-specific tokens onto dominant-tradition ones. The failure is at readout, not at representation. Asking the same question in the target culture's native language versus English produces failures that cluster within language but decouple across language: the decoder is gated on prompt language. We release a per-entity (probe, output) decomposition framework, a citation-anchored cross-cultural ground truth, a within- versus cross-mode correlation test for language-conditioned readout, and per-entity predictions for all 18 models.

45 pages, 23 figures, 18 tables. Dataset: this https URL Code: this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

I.2.7; I.2.6; J.5

arXiv:2608.02486 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.02486v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.02486 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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