@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2025-creating,
    title = "Creating a Lens of {C}hinese Culture: A Multimodal Dataset for {C}hinese Pun Rebus Art Understanding",
    author = "Zhang, Tuo  and
      Feng, Tiantian  and
      Ni, Yibin  and
      Cao, Mengqin  and
      Liu, Ruying  and
      Avestimehr, Kiana  and
      Butler, Katharine  and
      Weng, Yanjun  and
      Zhang, Mi  and
      Narayanan, Shrikanth  and
      Avestimehr, Salman",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.1155/",
    pages = "22473--22487",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Large vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in understanding everyday content. However, their performance in the domain of art, particularly culturally rich art forms, remains less explored. As a pearl of human wisdom and creativity, art encapsulates complex cultural narratives and symbolism. In this paper, we offer the Pun Rebus Art Dataset, a multimodal dataset for art understanding deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. We focus on three primary tasks: identifying salient visual elements, matching elements with their symbolic meanings, and explanations for the conveyed messages. Our evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art VLMs struggle with these tasks, often providing biased and hallucinated explanations and showing limited improvement through in-context learning. By releasing the Pun Rebus Art Dataset, we aim to facilitate the development of VLMs that can better understand and interpret culturally specific content, promoting greater inclusiveness beyond English-based corpora. The dataset and evaluation code are available at [this link](https://github.com/zhang-tuo-pdf/Pun-Rebus-Art-Benchmark)."
}