Claims about the universality of human concepts have been predominantly assessed through linguistic similarity across languages and cultures. However, words are effective as communication devices because they compress rich experiential variation into shared conventions, potentially obscuring hidden individual and cultural differences in how concepts are mentally represented.
arXiv:2609.12575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ambiguity is often treated as a bug for AI systems to resolve---but in human communication and culture, ambiguity can also be a generative resource. Fr...
The paper introduces VMetaphor-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating visual metaphor generation in text-to-image models, comprising 1,500 curated metaphors across three levels and ten categories, each paired with two prompts of varying specificity. It proposes a hybrid evaluation framework using a multiple-choice question protocol and dimension-based scoring to assess metaphorical fidelity. Experiments on 11 T2I models show that even top proprietary models struggle with compositional structuring and cross-domain mapping, underscoring the need for further research in this area.
arXiv:2510.26861v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal retrieval systems are expected to operate in a semantic space, agnostic to the language or cultural origin of the query. In practi...
arXiv:2605.05593v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across diverse tasks, the internal mechanisms governing how they encode...
arXiv:2608. 00410v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human language is highly polysemous.
arXiv:2510. 04391v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mental imagery vividness is a stable individual trait, yet whether imagined scenarios share relational structure across human and synthetic large language model (LLM) populations remains unknown.
The paper introduces VMetaphor-Bench, a benchmark for assessing visual metaphor generation in text-to-image models. It contains 1,500 curated metaphors across three levels and ten categories, each paired with two prompts of varying specificity. The authors evaluate 11 T2I models using a hybrid MLLM-as-judge framework that combines a large multiple-choice question set with dimension-based scoring, finding that even top proprietary models struggle with compositional structuring and cross-domain mapping.
arXiv:2607. 15847v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Metaphor in Arabic is a culturally grounded mechanism for constructing meaning, encoding cultural knowledge that shapes interpretation.
arXiv:2508.09852v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How can models help people communicate unusual perceptual experiences without changing what they mean? A recognizable image is only part of t...
arXiv:2609.37230v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual distinctions are often finer than those reflected in linguistic conceptualization. Vision-language models exhibit a similar asymmetry: a disti...
arXiv:2607. 16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image descriptions represented with language models (LMs) predict human brain responses to naturalistic images in high-level visual regions, but the factors driving this predictivity remain unclear.
The Cultural Moment Benchmark (CMB) evaluates video cultural reasoning in Southeast Asia by testing three distinct abilities: naming a cultural concept, visually recognizing it in a video, and locating its sub‑events in time. It contains 306 expert‑curated concepts from seven countries across five categories, with each concept assessed through three stages that use semantic‑similarity distractors, unlabeled video moments, and free‑form temporal localization. Experiments on six vision‑language models reveal varied failure modes, limited cascading between abilities, and differing impacts of audio and subtitles, while a human study shows even experts struggle with concepts from neighboring countries.