DVMap: Fine-Grained Pluralistic Value Alignment via High-Consensus Demographic-Value Mapping

Pengyun Zhu, Yuqi Ren, Zhen Wang, Lei Yang, Deyi Xiong


Abstract
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) typically rely on coarse-grained national labels for pluralistic value alignment. However, such macro-level supervision often obscures intra-country value heterogeneity, yielding a loose alignment.We argue that resolving this limitation requires shifting from national labels to multi-dimensional demographic constraints, which can identify groups with predictable, high-consensus value preference. To this end, we propose DVMap (High-Consensus Demographic-Value Mapping), a framework for fine-grained pluralistic value alignment. In this framework, we first present a demographic archetype extraction strategy to construct a high-quality value alignment corpus of 56,152 samples from the World Values Survey (WVS) by strictly retaining respondents with consistent value preferences under identical demographics. Over this corpus, we introduce a Structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism that explicitly guides LLMs to reason about demographic-value correlations. Subsequently, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to achieve adaptive anchoring of value distributions. To rigorously evaluate generalization, we further establish a triple-generalization benchmark (spanning cross-demographic, cross-country, and cross-value) comprising 21,553 samples. Experimental results demonstrate that DVMap effectively learns the manifold mapping from demographics to values, exhibiting strong generalization and robustness. On cross-demographic tests, Qwen3-8B-DVMap achieves 48.6% accuracy, surpassing the advanced open-source LLM DeepSeek-v3.2 (45.1%). The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/EnlightenedAI/DVMap.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.909
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
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ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
19834–19852
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.909/
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Cite (ACL):
Pengyun Zhu, Yuqi Ren, Zhen Wang, Lei Yang, and Deyi Xiong. 2026. DVMap: Fine-Grained Pluralistic Value Alignment via High-Consensus Demographic-Value Mapping. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 19834–19852, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DVMap: Fine-Grained Pluralistic Value Alignment via High-Consensus Demographic-Value Mapping (Zhu et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.909.pdf
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