{"ID":2834389,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01419","arxiv_id":"2512.01419","title":"Rice-VL: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Cultural Understanding Across ASEAN Countries","abstract":"Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in multimodal tasks but often exhibit Western-centric biases, limiting their effectiveness in culturally diverse regions like Southeast Asia (SEA). To address this, we introduce RICE-VL, a novel benchmark evaluating VLM cultural understanding across 11 ASEAN countries. RICE-VL includes over 28,000 human-curated Visual Question Answering (VQA) samples -- covering True or False, Fill-in-the-Blank, and open-ended formats -- and 1,000 image-bounding box pairs for Visual Grounding, annotated by culturally informed experts across 14 sub-ground categories. We propose SEA-LAVE, an extension of the LAVE metric, assessing textual accuracy, cultural alignment, and country identification. Evaluations of six open- and closed-source VLMs reveal significant performance gaps in low-resource countries and abstract cultural domains. The Visual Grounding task tests models' ability to localize culturally significant elements in complex scenes, probing spatial and contextual accuracy. RICE-VL exposes limitations in VLMs' cultural comprehension and highlights the need for inclusive model development to better serve diverse global populations.","short_abstract":"Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in multimodal tasks but often exhibit Western-centric biases, limiting their effectiveness in culturally diverse regions like Southeast Asia (SEA). To address this, we introduce RICE-VL, a novel benchmark evaluating VLM cultural understanding across 11 ASEAN countries. RICE-VL includ...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01419","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01419v1","authors":"[\"Tushar Pranav\",\"Eshan Pandey\",\"Austria Lyka Diane Bala\",\"Aman Chadha\",\"Indriyati Atmosukarto\",\"Donny Soh Cheng Lock\"]","published":"2025-12-01T08:55:41Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}