Multimodal vision-language models (VLMs) have made substantial progress in various tasks that require a combined understanding of visual and textual content, particularly in cultural understanding tasks, with the emergence of new cultural datasets. However, these datasets frequently fall short of providing cultural reasoning while underrepresenting many cultures.In this paper, we introduce the Seeing Culture Benchmark (SCB), focusing on cultural reasoning with a novel approach that requires VLMs to reason on culturally rich images in two stages: i) selecting the correct visual option with multiple-choice visual question answering (VQA), and ii) segmenting the relevant cultural artifact as evidence of reasoning. Visual options in the first stage are systematically organized into three types: those originating from the same country, those from different countries, or a mixed group. Notably, all options are derived from a singular category for each type. Progression to the second stage occurs only after a correct visual option is chosen. The SCB benchmark comprises 1,065 images that capture 138 cultural artifacts across five categories from seven Southeast Asia countries, whose diverse cultures are often overlooked, accompanied by 3,178 questions, of which 1,093 are unique and meticulously curated by human annotators. Our evaluation of various VLMs reveals the complexities involved in cross-modal cultural reasoning and highlights the disparity between visual reasoning and spatial grounding in culturally nuanced scenarios. The SCB serves as a crucial benchmark for identifying these shortcomings, thereby guiding future developments in the field of cultural reasoning. https://github.com/buraksatar/SeeingCulture

In existing sophisticated text-to-SQL models, schema linking is often considered as a simple, minor component, belying its importance. By providing a schema linking corpus based on the Spider text-to-SQL dataset, we systematically study the role of schema linking. We also build a simple BERT-based baseline, called Schema-Linking SQL (SLSQL) to perform a data-driven study. We find when schema linking is done well, SLSQL demonstrates good performance on Spider despite its structural simplicity. Many remaining errors are attributable to corpus noise. This suggests schema linking is the crux for the current text-to-SQL task. Our analytic studies provide insights on the characteristics of schema linking for future developments of text-to-SQL tasks.