We introduce DRISHTIKON, a first-of-its-kind multimodal and multilingual benchmark centered exclusively on Indian culture, designed to evaluate the cultural understanding of generative AI systems. Unlike existing benchmarks with a generic or global scope, DRISHTIKON offers deep, fine-grained coverage across India’s diverse regions, spanning 15 languages, covering all states and union territories, and incorporating over 64,000 aligned text-image pairs. The dataset captures rich cultural themes including festivals, attire, cuisines, art forms, and historical heritage amongst many more. We evaluate a wide range of vision-language models (VLMs), including open-source small and large models, proprietary systems, reasoning-specialized VLMs, and Indic-focused models—across zero-shot and chain-of-thought settings. Our results expose key limitations in current models’ ability to reason over culturally grounded, multimodal inputs, particularly for low-resource languages and less-documented traditions. DRISHTIKON fills a vital gap in inclusive AI research, offering a robust testbed to advance culturally aware, multimodally competent language technologies.

Progress in biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Entity Linking (EL) is currently hindered by a fragmented data landscape, a lack of resources for building explainable models, and the limitations of semantically-blind evaluation metrics. To address these challenges, we present MedPath, a large-scale and multi-domain biomedical EL dataset that builds upon nine existing expert-annotated EL datasets. In MedPath, all entities are 1) normalized using the latest version of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), 2) augmented with mappings to 62 other biomedical vocabularies and, crucially, 3) enriched with full ontological paths—i.e., from general to specific—in up to 11 biomedical vocabularies. MedPath directly enables new research frontiers in biomedical NLP, facilitating training and evaluation of semantic-rich and interpretable EL systems, and the development of the next generation of interoperable and explainable clinical NLP models.

Generating high-quality summaries for chat dialogs often requires large labeled datasets. We propose a method to efficiently use unlabeled data for extractive summarization of customer-agent dialogs. In our method, we frame summarization as a question-answering problem and use state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to generate pseudo-labels for a dialog. We then use these pseudo-labels to fine-tune a chat summarization model, effectively transferring knowledge from the large LLM into a smaller specialized model. We demonstrate our method on the TWEETSUMM dataset, and show that using 10% of the original labelled data set we can achieve 65.9/57.0/61.0 ROUGE-1/-2/-L, whereas the current state-of-the-art trained on the entire training data set obtains 65.16/55.81/64.37 ROUGE-1/-2/-L. In other words, in the worst case (i.e., ROUGE-L) we still effectively retain 94.7% of the performance while using only 10% of the data.