Evaluating Visual and Cultural Interpretation: The K-Viscuit Benchmark with Human-VLM Collaboration

ChaeHun Park, Yujin Baek, Jaeseok Kim, Yu-Jung Heo, Du-Seong Chang, Jaegul Choo


Abstract
To create culturally inclusive vision-language models (VLMs), developing a benchmark that tests their ability to address culturally relevant questions is essential. Existing approaches typically rely on human annotators, making the process labor-intensive and creating a cognitive burden in generating diverse questions. To address this, we propose a semi-automated framework for constructing cultural VLM benchmarks, specifically targeting multiple-choice QA. This framework combines human-VLM collaboration, where VLMs generate questions based on guidelines, a small set of annotated examples, and relevant knowledge, followed by a verification process by native speakers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework through the creation of K-Viscuit, a dataset focused on Korean culture. Our experiments on this dataset reveal that open-source models lag behind proprietary ones in understanding Korean culture, highlighting key areas for improvement. We also present a series of further analyses, including human evaluation, augmenting VLMs with external knowledge, and the evaluation beyond multiple-choice QA. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ddehun/k-viscuit.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1066
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
21960–21974
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1066/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
ChaeHun Park, Yujin Baek, Jaeseok Kim, Yu-Jung Heo, Du-Seong Chang, and Jaegul Choo. 2025. Evaluating Visual and Cultural Interpretation: The K-Viscuit Benchmark with Human-VLM Collaboration. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 21960–21974, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Visual and Cultural Interpretation: The K-Viscuit Benchmark with Human-VLM Collaboration (Park et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1066.pdf