CULTURE-CMT is a Chinese‑English benchmark that evaluates contextualized translation of social‑media comments by providing the original post and conversational context. It contains 572 manually verified examples grouped into Slang, Context, and Both, allowing diagnostic analysis of translation difficulty. The benchmark also introduces a retrieval‑augmented cultural‑effectiveness Judger that combines a calibrated scoring model with dynamically retrieved cultural knowledge.
By Linjuan Wu, Dingming Li, Yiwen Qiu, Xinze Lyu, Ye Guo, Daoxin Zhang, Zhe Xu, Weiming Lu
The paper "Prompt Revision as a Source of Cultural Bias in Text-to-Image Systems" investigates how commercial text‑to‑image models silently modify user prompts before generating images, a step that is often hidden from users. Using the multilingual benchmark WORLDVIEW, the authors audit the revision layer in DALL‑E‑3, Imagen‑4, and GPT‑Image‑1.5, finding that non‑Western and non‑Anglophone contexts are disproportionately marked, reduced to narrow vocabularies, and stereotyped. The study demonstrates that the revision layer itself is a previously undocumented causal source of cultural stereotyping, underscoring the need to audit deployed systems rather than just the underlying models.
By Aleksandra Urman, Elsa Lichtenegger, Salima Jaoua, Azza Bouleimen, Robin Forsberg, Corinna Hertweck, Stefania Ionescu, Nicol\`o Pagan, Ancsa Hannak, Joachim Baumann
arXiv:2609.37287v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Image translation is a fundamental capability of multimodal models for multilingual applications, requiring visual understanding and meaning preserva...
By Bo Lv, Mao Zheng, Zheng Li, Fangxu Liu, Mingrui Sun, Tao Chen
arXiv:2508. 05502v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform strongly in high-resource languages, yet often produce fluent but culturally "thin" descriptions in low-resource settings.
By Yufei Gao, Jiaying Fei, Nuo Chen, Ruirui Chen, Guohang Yan, Yunshi Lan, Botian Shi
Internet memes are a pervasive form of multimodal online communication; however, such communication often involves users from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, adapting memes acr...
TransMeme introduces a multi‑agent framework for cross‑cultural meme transcreation, addressing the unique challenges of preserving intent, adapting cultural meaning, and maintaining multimodal consistency. The system coordinates specialized agents for cultural adaptation, text rewriting, revision, and visual adjustment, and is evaluated on Chinese‑English meme pairs. Human and LLM‑based evaluations show that TransMeme outperforms baselines, achieving a 33.1% average improvement in human scores and a 60% Top‑1 ranking rate in LLM judgments.
By Jingyi Zheng, Yule Liu, Zifan Peng, Tianyi Hu, Yuemeng Zhao, Xinhu Zheng, Xinlei He
arXiv:2608. 11002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress in recent years.
By Sicheng Zhang, Zhonghao Yan, Binzhu Xie, Shi Qiu, Muzammal Naseer, Naveed Akhtar, Mubarak Shah
arXiv:2607. 20241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Culturally loaded translation poses unique challenges for machine translation (MT), as meanings are deeply embedded in socio-cultural contexts beyond surface linguistic forms.
By Yiming Wang, Jiayuan Di
The paper introduces Retrieval-Enhanced Cultural Evaluation (CUE-MT), a framework that trains social media translation models by incorporating a calibrated, domain‑specific Judger and an Agent that retrieves external evidence to generate concise hints for scoring translations. Using this approach, CUE-MT outperforms comparable open‑source baselines across multiple model sizes on both CUE‑MT‑Bench and three public benchmarks, achieving cultural effectiveness gains of 7.44–15.12 percentage points in human evaluation. Retrieval notably boosts the Judger’s four‑way classification accuracy by 8.07 percentage points compared to a no‑retrieval baseline, and ablation studies confirm the benefits of hard‑example mining and Agent‑enhanced rewards.
By Linjuan Wu, Yiwen Qiu, Xinze Lyu, Dingming Li, Hui Yao, Zhongyi Sang, Ye Guo, Daoxin Zhang, Zhe Xu, Fei zhao, Mu Chuan, Yao Hu, Weiming Lu, Yongliang Shen
VIDA (Visually-Dependent Ambiguity) is a new dataset comprising 2,500 curated instances designed to test whether multimodal machine translation models can use visual input to resolve ambiguous source spans. The authors also introduce Disambiguation-Centric Metrics, which employ an LLM-as-a-judge classifier to verify correct span-level resolution. Experiments with recent large vision‑language models show that visual disambiguation remains difficult, and that chain‑of‑thought supervised fine‑tuning yields stronger out‑of‑distribution performance, especially for collective‑noun ambiguities.
By Jingheng Pan, Xintong Wang, Longyue Wang, Liang Ding, Weihua Luo, Chris Biemann
arXiv:2503. 07265v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text-to-Image (T2I) models are capable of generating high-quality artistic creations and visual content.
By Yuwei Niu, Munan Ning, Mengren Zheng, Weiyang Jin, Bin Lin, Peng Jin, Jiaqi Liao, Chaoran Feng, Fanqing Meng, Kunpeng Ning, Bin Zhu, Li Yuan
CultureVidBench is a new benchmark that evaluates how well text‑to‑video generation models capture cultural details. It contains 1,000 prompts spanning 12 countries, 6 continents, 8 cultural regions, and 14 cultural aspects, grouped into material culture, social practice & performance, and ritual & ceremony. Human studies and automated assessments show that while current models perform well on semantic adherence and visual quality, they often miss fine‑grained cultural details, especially for underrepresented regions and multimodal cues.
By Xianjing Han, Yuhan Su, Yang Deng, Dong Ma, Wee Peng Tay, Bin Zhu