@inproceedings{ghaboura-etal-2025-time,
    title = "Time Travel: A Comprehensive Benchmark to Evaluate {LMM}s on Historical and Cultural Artifacts",
    author = "Ghaboura, Sara  and
      More, Ketan Pravin  and
      Thawkar, Ritesh  and
      Ghallabi, Wafa Al  and
      Thawakar, Omkar  and
      Khan, Fahad Shahbaz  and
      Cholakkal, Hisham  and
      Khan, Salman  and
      Anwer, Rao Muhammad",
    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/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.1211/",
    pages = "23627--23641",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Understanding historical and cultural artifacts demands human expertise and advanced computational techniques, yet the process remains complex and time-intensive. While large multimodal models offer promising support, their evaluation and improvement require a standardized benchmark. To address this, we introduce TimeTravel, a benchmark of 10,250 expert-verified samples spanning 266 distinct cultures across 10 major historical regions. Designed for AI-driven analysis of manuscripts, artworks, inscriptions, and archaeological discoveries, TimeTravel provides a structured dataset and robust evaluation framework to assess AI models' capabilities in classification, interpretation, and historical comprehension. By integrating AI with historical research, TimeTravel fosters AI-powered tools for historians, archaeologists, researchers, and cultural tourists to extract valuable insights while ensuring technology contributes meaningfully to historical discovery and cultural heritage preservation. We evaluate contemporary AI models on TimeTravel, highlighting their strengths and identifying areas for improvement. Our goal is to establish AI as a reliable partner in preserving cultural heritage, ensuring that technological advancements contribute meaningfully to historical discovery. We release the TimeTravel dataset and evaluation suite as open-source resources for culturally and historically informed research."
}