From Local Concepts to Universals: Evaluating the Multicultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models

Mehar Bhatia, Sahithya Ravi, Aditya Chinchure, EunJeong Hwang, Vered Shwartz


Abstract
Despite recent advancements in vision-language models, their performance remains suboptimal on images from non-western cultures due to underrepresentation in training datasets. Various benchmarks have been proposed to test models’ cultural inclusivity. Still, they have limited coverage of cultures and do not adequately assess cultural diversity across universal and culture-specific local concepts. To address these limitations, we introduce the GlobalRG benchmark, comprising two challenging tasks: retrieval across universals and cultural visual grounding. The former task entails retrieving culturally diverse images for universal concepts from 50 countries, while the latter aims at grounding culture-specific concepts within images from 15 countries. Our evaluation across a wide range of models reveals that the performance varies significantly across cultures – underscoring the necessity for enhancing multicultural understanding in vision-language models.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.385
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6763–6782
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.385
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mehar Bhatia, Sahithya Ravi, Aditya Chinchure, EunJeong Hwang, and Vered Shwartz. 2024. From Local Concepts to Universals: Evaluating the Multicultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6763–6782, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Local Concepts to Universals: Evaluating the Multicultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models (Bhatia et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.385.pdf