LKValues: Aligning Large Language Models with Sri Lankan Societal Values

TL;DR - LKValues is a survey-grounded dataset and benchmark for aligning and evaluating LLMs against Sri Lankan societal values in Sinhala and English. It exposes persistent cultural and low-resource alignment gaps and offers a replicable country-specific alignment pipeline.

• A trilingual survey of 205 respondents identified 40 majority-endorsed societal values.
• The suite includes a 150,000-instance Sinhala-English instruction corpus and a 1,000-instance evaluation benchmark.
• Fine-tuning improved Qwen-family models across both languages, reducing invalid outputs and cross-lingual disparities.
• Benefits varied by model family, while newer and larger models still showed cultural alignment gaps.