Worldcuisines: a massive-scale benchmark for multilingual and multicultural visual question answering on global cuisines

Winata, Genta Indra, Hudi, Frederikus, Irawan, Patrick Amadeus, Anugraha, David, Putri, Rifki Afina, Yutong, Wang, Nohejl, Adam, Prathama, Ubaidillah Ariq and Ousidhoum, Nedjma 2025. Worldcuisines: a massive-scale benchmark for multilingual and multicultural visual question answering on global cuisines. Presented at: The 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas, New Mexico, USA, 29 April - 4 May 2025. Published in: Chiruzzo, Luis, Ritter, Alan and Wang, Lu eds. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. , vol.1 USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 3242-3264. 10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.167

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Additional Information:	Additional authors: Afifa Amriani, Anar Rzayev, Anirban Das, Ashmari Pramodya, Aulia Adila, Bryan Wilie, Candy Olivia Mawalim, Cheng Ching Lam, Daud Abolade, Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Fariz Ikhwantri, Garry Kuwanto, Hanyang Zhao, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Holy Lovenia, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Jan Wira Gotama Putra, Junho Myung, Lucky Susanto, Maria Angelica Riera Machin, Marina Zhukova, Michael Anugraha, Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Natasha Christabelle Santosa, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Raj Dabre, Rio Alexander Audino, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephanie Yulia Salim, Yi Zhou, Yinxuan Gui, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Shogo Okada, Ayu Purwarianti, Alham Fikri Aji, Taro Watanabe, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Alice Oh, and Chong-Wah Ngo.
Publisher:	Association for Computational Linguistics
ISBN:	979-8891761896
Related URLs:	Publisher
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	26 June 2025
Last Modified:	26 Jun 2025 15:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/178477

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