CuRA: Culture-Conditioned Routing for Safe Agentic AI

This project tackles the challenge of cultural misalignment in AI agents, which often leads to unsafe or inappropriate behaviour in diverse, real-world interactions. CuRA introduces a dynamic routing framework that leverages specialised cultural adapters to generate context-aware, low-risk responses across multiple turns and modalities. Paired with CultureConverse—a multimodal, scenario-driven dataset grounded in Southeast Asian norms—the system learns to maintain cultural appropriateness, coherence, and etiquette in complex dialogues. Expected outcomes include measurable reductions in norm violations and improved user trust, paving the way for safer, culturally aligned AI in public-facing domains such as healthcare, education, and tourism.

This research is conducted via The Agentic AI Research and Innovation (AARI) Initiative which focuses on the next frontier of agentic systems through Grand Challenges with the academic community and Microsoft Research.