{"ID":2834166,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03173","arxiv_id":"2512.03173","title":"Culture Affordance Atlas: Reconciling Object Diversity Through Functional Mapping","abstract":"Culture shapes the objects people use and for what purposes, yet mainstream Vision-Language (VL) datasets frequently exhibit cultural biases, disproportionately favoring higher-income, Western contexts. This imbalance reduces model generalizability and perpetuates performance disparities, especially impacting lower-income and non-Western communities. To address these disparities, we propose a novel function-centric framework that categorizes objects by the functions they fulfill, across diverse cultural and economic contexts. We implement this framework by creating the Culture Affordance Atlas, a re-annotated and culturally grounded restructuring of the Dollar Street dataset spanning 46 functions and 288 objects publicly available at https://lit.eecs.umich.edu/CultureAffordance-Atlas/index.html. Through extensive empirical analyses using the CLIP model, we demonstrate that function-centric labels substantially reduce socioeconomic performance gaps between high- and low-income groups by a median of 6 pp (statistically significant), improving model effectiveness for lower-income contexts. Furthermore, our analyses reveals numerous culturally essential objects that are frequently overlooked in prominent VL datasets. Our contributions offer a scalable pathway toward building inclusive VL datasets and equitable AI systems.","short_abstract":"Culture shapes the objects people use and for what purposes, yet mainstream Vision-Language (VL) datasets frequently exhibit cultural biases, disproportionately favoring higher-income, Western contexts. This imbalance reduces model generalizability and perpetuates performance disparities, especially impacting lower-inc...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03173","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03173v1","authors":"[\"Joan Nwatu\",\"Longju Bai\",\"Oana Ignat\",\"Rada Mihalcea\"]","published":"2025-12-02T19:16:39Z","proceeding":"cs.CY","tasks":"[\"cs.CY\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.CL\",\"cs.CV\"]","methods":"[]","project_urls":"[\"https://lit.eecs.umich.edu/CultureAffordance-Atlas/index.html\"]","has_code":false}