VULCA-Bench: A Multicultural Vision-Language Benchmark for Evaluating Cultural Understanding

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07986v1
• Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:36:30 GMT
• Title: VULCA-Bench: A Multicultural Vision-Language Benchmark for Evaluating Cultural Understanding
• Abstract summary: We introduce VULCA-Bench, a multicultural art-critique benchmark for evaluating Vision-Language Models' (VLMs) cultural understanding beyond surface-level visual perception.<n>Existing VLM benchmarks predominantly measure L1-L2 capabilities while under-evaluate higher-order cultural interpretation.<n>VULCA-Bench contains 7,410 matched image-critique pairs spanning eight cultural traditions, with Chinese-English bilingual coverage.
• Score: 7.342985549865413
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We introduce VULCA-Bench, a multicultural art-critique benchmark for evaluating Vision-Language Models' (VLMs) cultural understanding beyond surface-level visual perception. Existing VLM benchmarks predominantly measure L1-L2 capabilities (object recognition, scene description, and factual question answering) while under-evaluate higher-order cultural interpretation. VULCA-Bench contains 7,410 matched image-critique pairs spanning eight cultural traditions, with Chinese-English bilingual coverage. We operationalise cultural understanding using a five-layer framework (L1-L5, from Visual Perception to Philosophical Aesthetics), instantiated as 225 culture-specific dimensions and supported by expert-written bilingual critiques. Our pilot results indicate that higher-layer reasoning (L3-L5) is consistently more challenging than visual and technical analysis (L1-L2). The dataset, evaluation scripts, and annotation tools are available under CC BY 4.0 in the supplementary materials.

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