CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark
NeurIPS, 2024

Visual Question Answering~(VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, which requires models to understand and reason on knowledge present in visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA datasets and models are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images that are Western-centric. While recent efforts have tried to increase the number of languages covered on VQA datasets, they still lack diversity in low-resource languages. More importantly, some datasets extend the text to other languages, either via translation or some other approaches, but usually keep the same images, resulting in narrow cultural representation. To address these limitations, we create CVQA, a new Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering benchmark dataset, designed to cover a rich set of languages and regions, where we engage native speakers and cultural experts in the data collection process. CVQA includes culturally-driven images and questions from across 28 countries in four continents, covering 26 languages with 11 scripts, providing a total of 9k questions. We benchmark several Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on CVQA, and we show that the dataset is challenging for the current state-of-the-art models. This benchmark will serve as a probing evaluation suite for assessing the cultural bias of multimodal models and hopefully encourage more research efforts towards increasing cultural awareness and linguistic diversity in this field.

Included in review: Yes
Modality: Multimodal