Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on tasks such as image captioning, visual question answering, and image-to-text generation. However, they are predominantly trained on English-centric data, which limits their ability to handle culturally grounded visual understanding and leads to failures in interpreting region-specific meanings, symbolic content, and context-dependent visual cues. Existing benchmarks for cultural competence are often template-driven and focused on surface-level recognition, making them insufficient for evaluating deeper linguistic and pragmatic understanding in culturally situated settings. We introduce PoVisLE, a monocultural vision-language benchmark for Polish designed to evaluate culturally grounded multimodal understanding under a grounded evaluation paradigm, where language is interpreted in interaction with visual context. The dataset contains 1,117 images and 2,366 manually annotated VQA pairs. Overall, our dataset provides a controlled and challenging resource for assessing culturally grounded vision-language understanding beyond surface-level recognition.1

Alignment is the critical process of minimizing harmful outputs by teaching large language models (LLMs) to prefer safe, helpful and appropriate responses. While the majority of alignment research and datasets remain overwhelmingly English-centric, ensuring safety across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts requires localized resources. In this paper, we introduce the first Polish preference dataset PLLuM-Align, created entirely through human annotation to reflect Polish language and cultural nuances. The dataset includes response rating, ranking, and multi-turn dialog data. Designed to reflect the linguistic subtleties and cultural norms of Polish, this resource lays the groundwork for more aligned Polish LLMs and contributes to the broader goal of multilingual alignment in underrepresented languages.