# ArtECulture: Benchmarking Culture-Conditioned Visual Emotion Understanding in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03358/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal emotion understanding, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 21 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Multimodal emotion understanding](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/multimodal-emotion-understanding/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13238/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Vision Language Models for Cultural Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10920/) (2024)
- [EmoSet: A Large-scale Visual Emotion Dataset with Rich Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07961/) (2023)
- [Building a Large Scale Dataset for Image Emotion Recognition: The Fine Print and The Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.02677/) (2016)
- [SentiCap: Generating Image Descriptions with Sentiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.01431/) (2015)
- [EmoVIT: Revolutionizing Emotion Insights with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16670/) (2024)
- [Contemplating Visual Emotions: Understanding and Overcoming Dataset Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02212/) (2018)
- [It is Okay to Not Be Okay: Overcoming Emotional Bias in Affective Image Captioning by Contrastive Data Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07660/) (2022)
- [FindingEmo: An Image Dataset for Emotion Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01355/) (2024)
- [No Culture Left Behind: ArtELingo-28, a Benchmark of WikiArt with Captions in 28 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03769/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05660/) (2025)
- [MME-Emotion: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09210/) (2025)
- [Grounding Multilingual Multimodal LLMs With Cultural Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07414/) (2025)
- [CULEMO: Cultural Lenses on Emotion -- Benchmarking LLMs for Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10688/) (2025)
- [SemEval-2025 Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07269/) (2025)
- [RAVENEA: A Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Visual Culture Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14462/) (2025)
- [CVLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Chinese Vision-Language Understanding Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01081/) (2024)
- [Tears or Cheers? Benchmarking LLMs via Culturally Elicited Distinct Affective Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13024/) (2026)
- [Emotion-Coherent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs via Emotional Rationale Verifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23506/) (2025)
- [MVEI & EmObserver: Empowering MLLM-Oriented Visual Emotional Intelligence via Emotion Statement Judgement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21061/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing visual emotion understanding methods typically ignore cultural variations in emotional perception. We introduce culture-conditioned visual emotion understanding, a task that predicts the culture-specific emotional perception of a given image and explains the underlying rationale. Although related benchmarks exist, they are limited by inconsistent individual annotations, which hinder the derivation of majority-supported culture-level emotion labels, and imbalanced cultural coverage. Thus, we present ArtECulture, a benchmark containing 6,792 artworks with culture-specific emotion labels and explanations across English, Chinese, and Arabic cultures, with balanced Western and non-Western content. Evaluations of 16 open- and closed-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) under a zero-shot setting reveal that the task remains challenging, with the best model achieving below 50% accuracy. To address this limitation, we introduce a retrieval-augmented culture-conditioned emotion understanding framework, which leverages a concept-based cultural emotion knowledge base to inject explicit cultural knowledge into MLLMs without additional training. The framework improves both culturally aligned emotion prediction and grounded explanation generation. Our benchmark and code will be publicly released.