As with all a such questions the answer is complicated. I think for the most part the idea that any side was fighting for the liberation of that colonized local populations would be wrong.

The Americans as a group probably came the closest. They were already in the process of devolving government to the Filipinos. In 1941 the Philippines had a President and a local Congress. Full and final transfer to an independent state was scheduled for July 4th 1944. The war and Japanese occupation disrupted this. Instead they achieved full independence on July 4th 1946, basically the next July 4th after joint US/Filipino control of the islands was reestablished. It was widely debated at the time whether the US should make liberating the Philippines an important war aim. The side that won out did so largely on a moral obligation argument. Thousands of Americans died because leaders like MacArthur felt that liberating all the Philippines was an important moral issue.

It should be mentioned though, that even the Americans weren't fighting for the liberation of Guam or their other pre-war holdings. Nor were they fighting for independence for the Dutch East Indies, French Indo-China, or Malaysia. But they did have at least one territory that they were fighting for local independence.

On the Japanese side, the war was started as a naked grab for land and resources. The East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was a post-hoc justification for the invasion. In practice locals frequently had less autonomy under the Japanese than they had under European and American colonial governments. And of course places like China actually were independent and run under Chinese governments prior to the Japanese arrival. That doesn't mean that some Japanese officials didn't try to follow ideas of pan-Asian unity etc. Masaharu Homma, the first Japanese Military Governor of the Philippines frequently clashed with his subordinates over their mistreatment of the Filipinos. I think it's telling that he didn't last long in his position, and was replaced with someone who took a much harder line toward the locals. In the end there wasn't much co-prosperity under Japanese rule.

As to the non-American Western Allies, they were pretty much fighting strictly to regain their territories. In the end they had to make some compromises. Indian Independence was granted in large part due to promises made during the war to keep India stable and on the British side. But that was (from the British point of view) an unfortunate consequence of the war, not a war aim.