Cultural Awareness is Represented but Not Decoded: Tracing Mythological Knowledge across 18 Open-Source LLMs
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 ...
| Authors | Iaroslav Chelombitko, Ekaterina Chelombitko, Mika Hämäläinen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.