mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

WorldCuisines: A Massive-Scale Benchmark for Multilingual and Multicultural Visual Question Answering on Global Cuisines

arXiv 2410.12705 ↗First posted 16 Oct 2024cs.CL cs.AI cs.CVcited by 39

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with culture-specific knowledge, particularly in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. To evaluate their understanding of such knowledge, we introduce WorldCuisines, a massive-scale benchmark for multilingual and multicultural, visually grounded language understanding. This benchmark includes a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects, spanning 9 language families and featuring over 1 million data points, making it the largest multicultural VQA benchmark to date. It includes tasks for identifying dish names and their origins. We provide evaluation datasets in two sizes (12k and 60k instances) alongside a training dataset (1 million instances). Our findings show that while VLMs perform better with correct location context, they struggle with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages. To support future research, we release a knowledge base with annotated food entries and images along with the VQA data.

Key facts. Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 21 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2024.

Builds on

21 of 55 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Benchmarking Vision Language Models for Cultural Understanding15 Jul
  2. 2024CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark10 Jun
  3. 2023mBLIP: Efficient Bootstrapping of Multilingual Vision-LLMs13 Jul

Other references · 18

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
  2. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,192
  3. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  4. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
  5. 2023Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 4,362
  6. 2024Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phonecited by 1,883
  7. 2019Cross-lingual Language Model Pretrainingcited by 1,088
  8. 2020The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP Worldcited by 789
  9. 2021Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Culturescited by 188
  10. 2024Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A Surveycited by 166
  11. 2024Aria: An Open Multimodal Native Mixture-of-Experts Modelcited by 136
  12. 2024NVLM: Open Frontier-Class Multimodal LLMscited by 124
6 more
  1. 2015Are You Talking to a Machine? Dataset and Methods for Multilingual Image Question Answeringcited by 80
  2. 2023Multi-lingual and Multi-cultural Figurative Language Understandingcited by 47
  3. 2023FoodLMM: A Versatile Food Assistant using Large Multi-modal Modelcited by 32
  4. 2024FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culturecited by 25
  5. 2024MINERS: Multilingual Language Models as Semantic Retrieverscited by 11
  6. 2024X-LLaVA: Optimizing Bilingual Large Vision-Language Alignmentcited by 10

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 3; 2025: 25; 2026: 11.

39 papers.

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  1. 2025CultureVLM: Characterizing and Improving Cultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models for over 100 Countriescited by 40
  2. 2025Explain Before You Answer: A Survey on Compositional Visual Reasoningcited by 26
  3. 2025Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Aheadcited by 15
  4. 2025Hire Your Anthropologist! Rethinking Culture Benchmarks Through an Anthropological Lenscited by 13
  5. 2024Richer Output for Richer Countries: Uncovering Geographical Disparities in Generated Stories and Travel Recommendationscited by 9
  6. 2025Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asiacited by 8
  7. 2025IndicVisionBench: Benchmarking Cultural and Multilingual Understanding in VLMscited by 7
  8. 2024Linguistics Theory Meets LLM: Code-Switched Text Generation via Equivalence Constrained Large Language Modelscited by 6
  9. 2025MEXA: Towards General Multimodal Reasoning with Dynamic Multi-Expert Aggregationcited by 6
  10. 2025SinhalaMMLU: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Multitask Language Understanding in Sinhalacited by 6
  11. 2025Hallucination reduction with CASAL: Contrastive Activation Steering For Amortized Learningcited by 6
  12. 2025Hanfu-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark on Cross-Temporal Cultural Understanding and Transcreationcited by 5
27 more
  1. 2024Benchmarking Multimodal Models for Ukrainian Language Understanding Across Academic and Cultural Domainscited by 4
  2. 2025CUS-QA: Local-Knowledge-Oriented Open-Ended Question Answering Datasetcited by 4
  3. 2025What are Foundation Models Cooking in the Post-Soviet World?cited by 3
  4. 2025VisTW: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Traditional Chinese in Taiwancited by 3
  5. 2025WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity by Surfacing Knowledge Gaps Between English Wikipedia and other Language Editionscited by 3
  6. 2025Let's Play Across Cultures: A Large Multilingual, Multicultural Benchmark for Assessing Language Models' Understanding of Sportscited by 3
  7. 2025Benchmarking Vision Language Models on German Factual Datacited by 2
  8. 2025What Causes Knowledge Loss in Multilingual Language Models?cited by 2
  9. 2025Camellia: Benchmarking Cultural Biases in LLMs for Asian Languagescited by 2
  10. 2026Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languagescited by 2
  11. 2026Anthropogenic Regional Adaptation in Multimodal Vision-Language Modelcited by 2
  12. 2025Multilingual Vision-Language Models, A Surveycited by 1
  13. 2025M4-RAG: A Massive-Scale Multilingual Multi-Cultural Multimodal RAGcited by 1
  14. 2025Are Vision Language Models Cross-Cultural Theory of Mind Reasoners?cited by 1
  15. 2026Momento: Evaluating Persistent Memory and Reasoning with Multi-Session Agentic Conversationscited by 1
  16. 2026Jako Tako or Fluent? Presenting PoVisLE: A Polish Vision-Language Evaluationcited by 1
  17. 2025Image-Text Relation Prediction for Multilingual Tweetscited by 0
  18. 2025EMLoC: Emulator-based Memory-efficient Fine-tuning with LoRA Correctioncited by 0
  19. 2025Thought-For-Food: Reasoning Chain Induced Food Visual Question Answeringcited by 0
  20. 2025SEA-SafeguardBench: Evaluating AI Safety in SEA Languages and Culturescited by 0
  21. 2026Beyond Translation: Cross-Cultural Meme Transcreation with Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
  22. 2026Toward Culturally Grounded Natural Language Processingcited by 0
  23. 2026NRITYAM: Language Models Meet Art and Heritage of Dancecited by 0
  24. 2026From Critic to Confidence: PPO for Language-Based Quantitative Prediction with Confidence Estimationcited by 0
  25. 2026Eating for a Sustainable Planet: Personalized Sustainable Diet Recommendation via Constraint-Aware Decision-Making Modelingcited by 0
  26. 2026NutriBench-Kitchen: Benchmarking Embodied AI for Nutrition Managementcited by 0
  27. 2026CultureMINE: Datasets and Methods for Improving the Cultural Capabilities of NLP Systemscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025World in a Frame: Understanding Culture Mixing as a New Challenge for Vision-Language Models
  2. 2025Rice-VL: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Cultural Understanding Across ASEAN Countries
  3. 2024CROPE: Evaluating In-Context Adaptation of Vision and Language Models to Culture-Specific Concepts
  4. 2025Grounding Multilingual Multimodal LLMs With Cultural Knowledge
  5. 2025Seeing Culture: A Benchmark for Visual Reasoning and Grounding
  6. 2025BLEnD-Vis: Benchmarking Multimodal Cultural Understanding in Vision Language Models
  7. 2023Food-500 Cap: A Fine-Grained Food Caption Benchmark for Evaluating Vision-Language Models
  8. 2024Cross-Lingual Text-Rich Visual Comprehension: An Information Theory Perspective