The awareness of multi-cultural human values is critical to the ability of language models (LMs) to generate safe and personalized responses. However, this awareness of LMs has been insufficiently studied, since the computer science community lacks access to the large-scale real-world data about multi-cultural values. In this paper, we present WorldValuesBench, a globally diverse, large-scale benchmark dataset for the multi-cultural value prediction task, which requires a model to generate a rating response to a value question based on demographic contexts. Our dataset is derived from an influential social science project, World Values Survey (WVS), that has collected answers to hundreds of value questions (e.g., social, economic, ethical) from 94,728 participants worldwide. We have constructed more than 20 million examples of the type "(demographic attributes, value question) → answer” from the WVS responses. We perform a case study using our dataset and show that the task is challenging for strong open and closed-source models. On merely 11.1%, 25.0%, 72.2%, and 75.0% of the questions, Alpaca-7B, Vicuna-7B-v1.5, Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1, and GPT-3.5 Turbo can respectively achieve <0.2 Wasserstein 1-distance from the human normalized answer distributions. WorldValuesBench opens up new research avenues in studying limitations and opportunities in multi-cultural value awareness of LMs.

Editing model parameters directly in Transformers makes updating open-source transformer-based models possible without re-training (Meng et al., 2023).However, these editing methods have only been evaluated on statements about encyclopedic knowledge with a single correct answer.Commonsense knowledge with multiple correct answers, e.g., an apple can be green or red but not transparent, has not been studied but is as essential for enhancing transformers' reliability and usefulness.In this paper, we investigate whether commonsense judgments are causally associated with localized, editable parameters in Transformers, and we provide an affirmative answer.We find that directly applying the MEMIT editing algorithm results in sub-par performance, and propose to improve it for the commonsense domain by varying edit tokens and improving the layer selection strategy, i.e., MEMIT CSK .GPT-2 Large and XL models edited using MEMIT CSK outperform best-fine-tuned baselines by 10.97% and 10.73% F1 scores on PEP3k and 20Q datasets.In addition, we propose a novel evaluation dataset, PROBE SET, that contains unaffected and affected neighborhoods, affected paraphrases, and affected reasoning challenges.MEMIT CSK performs well across the metrics while fine-tuning baselines show significant trade-offs between unaffected and affected metrics.These results suggest a compelling future direction for incorporating feedback about common sense into Transformers through direct model editing. 1 * Co-first and last authors.Lorraine's work done at AI2. 1 Code and datasets for all experiments are available at https://github.com/anshitag/memit_csk