Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts: A Culturally Grounded Physical Reasoning Benchmark

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17807v2
• Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2025 12:45:16 GMT
• Title: Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts: A Culturally Grounded Physical Reasoning Benchmark
• Abstract summary: Existing physical commonsense reasoning benchmarks predominantly focus on Western contexts, overlooking cultural variations in physical problem-solving.<n>EPiK (Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts) is a novel benchmark comprising 181 binary-choice problems that test physical reasoning within Korean cultural contexts.<n>EPiK is constructed using a two-stage generation and verification pipeline to create culturally-authentic problems.
• Score: 12.080497081698299
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Existing physical commonsense reasoning benchmarks predominantly focus on Western contexts, overlooking cultural variations in physical problem-solving. To address this gap, we introduce EPiK (Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts), a novel benchmark comprising 181 binary-choice problems that test physical reasoning within Korean cultural contexts, ranging from kimchi (Korean food) to traditional fermentation. EPiK is constructed using a two-stage generation and verification pipeline to create culturally-authentic problems across 9 reasoning subtasks and 84 scenarios. Unlike approaches based on simple translation, our method generates problems organically from Korean contexts while upholding rigorous physical reasoning standards. Our evaluations show that Korean-specialized models consistently outperform general-purpose models of comparable size. This performance gap highlights the limitations of culturally-agnostic models and demonstrates the critical need for culturally-aware benchmarks to truly measure language understanding. Our EPiK is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/jjae/EPiK.

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