Cultural Awareness in Vision-Language Models: A Cross-Country Exploration
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866909624057200640 |
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| author | Madasu, Avinash Lal, Vasudev Howard, Phillip |
| author_facet | Madasu, Avinash Lal, Vasudev Howard, Phillip |
| contents | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse cultural contexts, yet their internal biases remain poorly understood. In this work, we propose a novel framework to systematically evaluate how VLMs encode cultural differences and biases related to race, gender, and physical traits across countries. We introduce three retrieval-based tasks: (1) Race to Country retrieval, which examines the association between individuals from specific racial groups (East Asian, White, Middle Eastern, Latino, South Asian, and Black) and different countries; (2) Personal Traits to Country retrieval, where images are paired with trait-based prompts (e.g., Smart, Honest, Criminal, Violent) to investigate potential stereotypical associations; and (3) Physical Characteristics to Country retrieval, focusing on visual attributes like skinny, young, obese, and old to explore how physical appearances are culturally linked to nations. Our findings reveal persistent biases in VLMs, highlighting how visual representations may inadvertently reinforce societal stereotypes. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_20326 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Cultural Awareness in Vision-Language Models: A Cross-Country Exploration Madasu, Avinash Lal, Vasudev Howard, Phillip Computers and Society Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse cultural contexts, yet their internal biases remain poorly understood. In this work, we propose a novel framework to systematically evaluate how VLMs encode cultural differences and biases related to race, gender, and physical traits across countries. We introduce three retrieval-based tasks: (1) Race to Country retrieval, which examines the association between individuals from specific racial groups (East Asian, White, Middle Eastern, Latino, South Asian, and Black) and different countries; (2) Personal Traits to Country retrieval, where images are paired with trait-based prompts (e.g., Smart, Honest, Criminal, Violent) to investigate potential stereotypical associations; and (3) Physical Characteristics to Country retrieval, focusing on visual attributes like skinny, young, obese, and old to explore how physical appearances are culturally linked to nations. Our findings reveal persistent biases in VLMs, highlighting how visual representations may inadvertently reinforce societal stereotypes. |
| title | Cultural Awareness in Vision-Language Models: A Cross-Country Exploration |
| topic | Computers and Society Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20326 |