Evaluating Cultural Knowledge Editing in Vision-Language Models

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have improved image captioning for cultural heritage. However, inferring structured cultural metadata (e.g., creator, origin, period) from visual input remains underexplored. We introduce a multi-category, cross-cultural benchmark for this task and evaluate VLMs using an LLM-as-Judge framework that measures semantic alignment with reference annotations. To assess cultural reasoning, we report exact-match, partial-match, and attribute-level accuracy across cultural regions. Results show that models capture fragmented signals and exhibit substantial performance variation across cultures and metadata types, leading to inconsistent and weakly grounded predictions. These findings highlight the limitations of current VLMs in structured cultural metadata inference beyond visual perception.

Model editing aims to update knowledge to add new concepts and change relevant information without retraining. Lifelong editing is a challenging task, prone to disrupting previously learned concepts, especially for Vision Language Models (VLMs), because sequential edits can lead to degraded reasoning and cross modal misalignment. Existing VLM knowledge editing methods based on gated adapters, activation edits, and parameter merging techniques address catastrophic forgetting seen in full fine tuning; however, they still operate in the shared representation space of the VLM, where concepts are entangled, so edits interfere with other non relevant concepts. We hypothesize that this instability persists because current methods algorithmically control edits via optimization rather than structurally separating knowledge. We introduce Dynamic Subspace Concept Alignment (DSCA) which by design mitigates this limitation by decomposing the representation space into a set of orthogonal semantic subspaces and proposing edits only in those transformed spaces. These subspaces are obtained through incremental clustering and PCA on joint vision language representations. This process structurally isolates concepts, enabling precise, non interfering edits by turning isolation from a soft training objective into an architectural property. The surgical edits are guided by a multi term loss function for maintaining task fidelity, edit locality, and cross modal alignment. With the base model frozen, our method achieves 98 percent single edit success, remains over 95 percent after 1000 sequential edits, lowers hallucination by 3 to 5 percent, and achieves the best backward transfer (BWT) scores on continual instruction tuning benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate DSCA state of the art stability and knowledge retention capability in continual lifelong editing across various datasets and benchmarks.

Model editing promises a fast, targeted way to correct post-deployment mistakes in medical vision-language models (VLMs) without costly retraining. However, existing multimodal model editing benchmarks focus on general-purpose tasks and do not reflect realistic clinical domain requirements and variability. To address this, we introduce M3Bench, a clinically grounded benchmark for multimodal model editing that evaluates whether an edit remains reliable, precise, and generalizable under the challenges of image and text variation, modality and protocol shifts, clinical knowledge composition, and temporal progression. M3Bench contains 16,276 questions spanning diverse anatomy, modalities, and specialties, and supports both single and sequential edits. By evaluating 4 representative editors across 6 medical and general VLMs, we find that no method excels across all criteria. Gradient-based editors achieve strong transfer but suffer from catastrophic locality violations, whereas memory-based methods preserve locality but lack compositional generality and exhibit high backbone-dependent hyperparameter sensitivity. We further attribute these failures to the latent space geometry of VLMs and how different editing methods shift its landscape. Overall, M3Bench establishes a rigorous clinical stress test for multimodal model editing and offers actionable guidance for safer post-deployment adaptation. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/BioMed-AI-Lab-U-Michgan/M3Bench .