CulturalFrames: Assessing Cultural Expectation Alignment in Text-to-Image Models and Evaluation Metrics

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08835v1
• Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:21:46 GMT
• Title: CulturalFrames: Assessing Cultural Expectation Alignment in Text-to-Image Models and Evaluation Metrics
• Authors: Shravan Nayak, Mehar Bhatia, Xiaofeng Zhang, Verena Rieser, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Yash Goyal, Karolina Stańczak, Aishwarya Agrawal,
• Abstract summary: We quantify the alignment of text-to-image (T2I) models and evaluation metrics with respect to both explicit and implicit cultural expectations.<n>We introduce CulturalFrames, a novel benchmark designed for rigorous human evaluation of cultural representation in visual generations.<n>We find that T2I models fail to meet the more challenging implicit expectations but also the less challenging explicit expectations.
• Score: 23.567641319277943
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The increasing ubiquity of text-to-image (T2I) models as tools for visual content generation raises concerns about their ability to accurately represent diverse cultural contexts. In this work, we present the first study to systematically quantify the alignment of T2I models and evaluation metrics with respect to both explicit as well as implicit cultural expectations. To this end, we introduce CulturalFrames, a novel benchmark designed for rigorous human evaluation of cultural representation in visual generations. Spanning 10 countries and 5 socio-cultural domains, CulturalFrames comprises 983 prompts, 3637 corresponding images generated by 4 state-of-the-art T2I models, and over 10k detailed human annotations. We find that T2I models not only fail to meet the more challenging implicit expectations but also the less challenging explicit expectations. Across models and countries, cultural expectations are missed an average of 44% of the time. Among these failures, explicit expectations are missed at a surprisingly high average rate of 68%, while implicit expectation failures are also significant, averaging 49%. Furthermore, we demonstrate that existing T2I evaluation metrics correlate poorly with human judgments of cultural alignment, irrespective of their internal reasoning. Collectively, our findings expose critical gaps, providing actionable directions for developing more culturally informed T2I models and evaluation methodologies.

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