Portrait of Shravan Nayak

Shravan Nayak

shravan.nayak@mila.quebec
PhD - Université de Montréal
Supervisor
Aishwarya Agrawal
Research Topics
Computer Vision
Generative Models
Multimodal Learning
Natural Language Processing
Website
Google Scholar
GitHub

Publications

Benchmarking Vision Language Models for Cultural Understanding
Shravan Nayak
Kanishk Jain
Rabiul Awal
Siva Reddy
Sjoerd van Steenkiste
Lisa Anne Hendricks
Karolina Stanczak
Aishwarya Agrawal
Foundation models and vision-language pre-training have notably advanced Vision Language Models (VLMs), enabling multimodal processing of vi… (see more)sual and linguistic data. However, their performance has been typically assessed on general scene understanding - recognizing objects, attributes, and actions - rather than cultural comprehension. This study introduces CulturalVQA, a visual question-answering benchmark aimed at assessing VLM's geo-diverse cultural understanding. We curate a collection of 2,378 image-question pairs with 1-5 answers per question representing cultures from 11 countries across 5 continents. The questions probe understanding of various facets of culture such as clothing, food, drinks, rituals, and traditions. Benchmarking VLMs on CulturalVQA, including GPT-4V and Gemini, reveals disparity in their level of cultural understanding across regions, with strong cultural understanding capabilities for North America while significantly lower performance for Africa. We observe disparity in their performance across cultural facets too, with clothing, rituals, and traditions seeing higher performances than food and drink. These disparities help us identify areas where VLMs lack cultural understanding and demonstrate the potential of CulturalVQA as a comprehensive evaluation set for gauging VLM progress in understanding diverse cultures.
2023-12-31
EMNLP (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org