TCC-Bench: Benchmarking the Traditional Chinese Culture Understanding Capabilities of MLLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11275v1
• Date: Fri, 16 May 2025 14:10:41 GMT
• Title: TCC-Bench: Benchmarking the Traditional Chinese Culture Understanding Capabilities of MLLMs
• Authors: Pengju Xu, Yan Wang, Shuyuan Zhang, Xuan Zhou, Xin Li, Yue Yuan, Fengzhao Li, Shunyuan Zhou, Xingyu Wang, Yi Zhang, Haiying Zhao,
• Abstract summary: TCC-Bench is a benchmark for assessing the understanding of traditional Chinese culture by MLLMs.<n>It comprises culturally rich and visually diverse data, incorporating images from museum artifacts, everyday life scenes, comics, and other culturally significant contexts.<n>We adopt a semi-automated pipeline that utilizes GPT-4o in text-only mode to generate candidate questions, followed by human curation to ensure data quality and avoid potential data leakage.
• Score: 13.069833806549914
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced the ability of artificial intelligence systems to understand and generate multimodal content. However, these models often exhibit limited effectiveness when applied to non-Western cultural contexts, which raises concerns about their wider applicability. To address this limitation, we propose the \textbf{T}raditional \textbf{C}hinese \textbf{C}ulture understanding \textbf{Bench}mark (\textbf{TCC-Bench}), a bilingual (\textit{i.e.}, Chinese and English) Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark specifically designed for assessing the understanding of traditional Chinese culture by MLLMs. TCC-Bench comprises culturally rich and visually diverse data, incorporating images from museum artifacts, everyday life scenes, comics, and other culturally significant contexts. We adopt a semi-automated pipeline that utilizes GPT-4o in text-only mode to generate candidate questions, followed by human curation to ensure data quality and avoid potential data leakage. The benchmark also avoids language bias by preventing direct disclosure of cultural concepts within question texts. Experimental evaluations across a wide range of MLLMs demonstrate that current models still face significant challenges when reasoning about culturally grounded visual content. The results highlight the need for further research in developing culturally inclusive and context-aware multimodal systems. The code and data can be found at: https://github.com/Morty-Xu/TCC-Bench.

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