Cultural Understanding

Research on cultural understanding focuses on developing and evaluating artificial intelligence's ability to comprehend and appropriately respond to diverse cultural contexts. Current efforts utilize large multimodal models (LMMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), often benchmarked using datasets designed to assess cultural knowledge across various facets like clothing, food, and traditions. These studies reveal significant disparities in model performance across different cultures and cultural elements, highlighting the need for more culturally sensitive AI systems. This work has implications for creating more inclusive and equitable AI applications, as well as advancing our understanding of how cultural values and representations are encoded and processed.