aiqbench analysis
This paper introduces MemeCULT-1K, a new benchmark evaluating how well Vision-Language Models grasp implicit cultural knowledge and pragmatic inference within South Asian contexts. The study demonstrates that while providing minimal cultural context significantly improves model performance across multiple metrics, both closed-source and open-source models still struggle with specific entity misidentifications and broader cultural gaps. These findings highlight the critical need for explicit cultural knowledge integration to advance multimodal AI beyond literal text recognition in diverse linguistic environments.
MemeCULT-1K: Benchmarking South Asian Cultural Context and Humor Understanding of Multimodal Models
arXiv:2609.01772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meme understanding goes beyond recognizing visual content or literal text; it requires implicit cultural knowledge and pragmatic inference that most vision-language models still lack. We introduce MemeCULT-1K, a multilingual benchmark of 1,000 South Asian memes in Bengali, English, and Hindi, where each meme is paired with a cultural context note and three human-written explanations, along with a supplementary set of 54 Bengali regional dialect memes. We evaluate thirteen popular Vision Language Models (VLMs) under two settings: meme-only and context-aware. Providing minimal cultural context yields consistent gains across all models and languages: mean SBERT similarity improves from 44.6 to 56.4 (+11.8), BLEURT from 37.3 to 42.3 (+5.0), and LLM-as-a-Judge scores from 2.57 to 3.43 out of 5 (+0.86). Fine-grained error analysis reveals that closed-source models fail mainly on entity and reference misidentification, while open-source models are bottlenecked by broader cultural knowledge gaps, with linguistic and phonological failures proving the most context-resistant across both. These results highlight the difficulty of culturally grounded meme understanding and motivate future work on explicit cultural knowledge integration. Our dataset and code are publicly available at TawsifDipto17/MemeCULT-1K.
Abstract:Meme understanding goes beyond recognizing visual content or literal text; it requires implicit cultural knowledge and pragmatic inference that most vision-language models still lack. We introduce MemeCULT-1K, a multilingual benchmark of 1,000 South Asian memes in Bengali, English, and Hindi, where each meme is paired with a cultural context note and three human-written explanations, along with a supplementary set of 54 Bengali regional dialect memes. We evaluate thirteen popular Vision Language Models (VLMs) under two settings: meme-only and context-aware. Providing minimal cultural context yields consistent gains across all models and languages: mean SBERT similarity improves from 44.6 to 56.4 (+11.8), BLEURT from 37.3 to 42.3 (+5.0), and LLM-as-a-Judge scores from 2.57 to 3.43 out of 5 (+0.86). Fine-grained error analysis reveals that closed-source models fail mainly on entity and reference misidentification, while open-source models are bottlenecked by broader cultural knowledge gaps, with linguistic and phonological failures proving the most context-resistant across both. These results highlight the difficulty of culturally grounded meme understanding and motivate future work on explicit cultural knowledge integration. Our dataset and code are publicly available at TawsifDipto17/MemeCULT-1K.
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
arXiv:2609.01772 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2609.01772v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.01772 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 281 words
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