Large language models, despite their remarkable success in recent years, still exhibit severe cultural bias. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce CultureInstruct, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset designed to reduce cultural bias in LLMs. CultureInstruct is constructed with an automatic pipeline, utilizing public web sources and a specialized LLM to generate instruction. Our data comprises 430K instructions, ranging from classic NLP tasks to complex reasoning. CultureInstruct also covers 11 most relevant topics to cultural knowledge, making it highly diverse. Our experiments show that fine-tuning LLMs with CultureInstruct results in consistent improvements across three types of cultural benchmarks, including (i) general cultural knowledge, (ii) human opinions and values, and (iii) linguistic cultural bias. Our best model, Qwen2-Instruct 72B + CultureInstruct, outperforms GPT-4o Mini and GPT-4o with 18.47% and 13.07% average relative improvements on cultural benchmarks.

Sociocultural norms serve as guiding principles for personal conduct in social interactions within a particular society or culture. The study of norm discovery has seen significant development over the last few years, with various interesting approaches. However, it is difficult to adopt these approaches to discover norms in a new culture, as they rely either on human annotations or real-world dialogue contents. This paper presents a robust automatic norm discovery pipeline, which utilizes the cultural knowledge of GPT-3.5 Turbo (ChatGPT) along with several social factors. By using these social factors and ChatGPT, our pipeline avoids the use of human dialogues that tend to be limited to specific scenarios, as well as the use of human annotations that make it difficult and costly to enlarge the dataset. The resulting database - Multi-cultural Norm Base (MNB) - covers 6 distinct cultures, with over 150k sociocultural norm statements in total. A state-of-the-art Large Language Model (LLM), Llama 3, fine-tuned with our proposed dataset, shows remarkable results on various downstream tasks, outperforming models fine-tuned on other datasets significantly.