Shiwei Guo

Shiwei Guo, Sihang Jiang, Qianxi He et al.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on multilingual tasks. Given its wide range of applications, cross-cultural understanding capability is a crucial competency. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating whether LLMs genuinely possess this capability suffer from three key limitations: a lack of contextual scenarios, insufficient cross-cultural concept mapping, and limited deep cultural reasoning capabilities. To address these gaps, we propose SAGE, a scenario-based benchmark built via cross-cultural core concept alignment and generative task design, to evaluate LLMs' cross-cultural understanding and reasoning. Grounded in cultural theory, we categorize cross-cultural capabilities into nine dimensions. Using this framework, we curated 210 core concepts and constructed 4530 test items across 15 specific real-world scenarios, organized under four broader categories of cross-cultural situations, following established item design principles. The SAGE dataset supports continuous expansion, and experiments confirm its transferability to other languages. It reveals model weaknesses across both dimensions and scenarios, exposing systematic limitations in cross-cultural reasoning. While progress has been made, LLMs are still some distance away from reaching a truly nuanced cross-cultural understanding. In compliance with the anonymity policy, we include data and code in the supplement materials. In future versions, we will make them publicly available online.

Jinghao Zhang, Sihang Jiang, Shiwei Guo et al.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse cultural environments, evaluating their cultural understanding capability has become essential for ensuring trustworthy and culturally aligned applications. However, most existing benchmarks lack comprehensiveness and are challenging to scale and adapt across different cultural contexts, because their frameworks often lack guidance from well-established cultural theories and tend to rely on expert-driven manual annotations. To address these issues, we propose CultureScope, the most comprehensive evaluation framework to date for assessing cultural understanding in LLMs. Inspired by the cultural iceberg theory, we design a novel dimensional schema for cultural knowledge classification, comprising 3 layers and 140 dimensions, which guides the automated construction of culture-specific knowledge bases and corresponding evaluation datasets for any given languages and cultures. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively evaluate cultural understanding. They also reveal that existing large language models lack comprehensive cultural competence, and merely incorporating multilingual data does not necessarily enhance cultural understanding. All code and data files are available at https://github.com/HoganZinger/Culture

Shiwei Guo, Ziang Chen, Yupeng Ma et al.

The Transformer model has shown strong performance in multivariate time series forecasting by leveraging channel-wise self-attention. However, this approach lacks temporal constraints when computing temporal features and does not utilize cumulative historical series effectively.To address these limitations, we propose the Structured Channel-wise Transformer with Cumulative Historical state (SCFormer). SCFormer introduces temporal constraints to all linear transformations, including the query, key, and value matrices, as well as the fully connected layers within the Transformer. Additionally, SCFormer employs High-order Polynomial Projection Operators (HiPPO) to deal with cumulative historical time series, allowing the model to incorporate information beyond the look-back window during prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that SCFormer significantly outperforms mainstream baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing time series forecasting. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ShiweiGuo1995/SCFormer