BanglaVerse is a new benchmark that evaluates multilingual vision‑language models on Bengali culture, covering nine visual domains and expanding to four languages and five Bangla dialects for a total of about 32,200 artifacts. It includes visual question answering and captioning tasks built from 1,152 manually curated images. Experiments show that models perform worse on dialectal variants and that missing cultural knowledge, rather than visual grounding, is the main bottleneck.
By Nurul Labib Sayeedi, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Mahbub E Sobhani, Rubaya Tabassum, Ariful Ekraj Hridoy, Mehraj Mahmood, Md. Tarek Hasan, Swakkhar Shatabda
MemeLens is a unified multilingual, multitask Vision‑Language Model designed to improve meme understanding across a wide range of tasks such as hate, misogyny, propaganda, sentiment, and humour. The authors consolidated 38 public meme datasets, mapping their labels into a shared taxonomy of 20 tasks covering harm, targets, figurative intent, and affect, and conducted extensive experiments to show that multimodal training and a unified approach outperform fine‑tuning on individual datasets. All experimental resources, the model, and the datasets are released publicly for community use.
By Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Abul Hasnat, Dimitar Dimitrov, Giovanni Da San Martino, Preslav Nakov, Firoj Alam
arXiv:2609.00491v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Communicating across cultures is inherently challenging, especially through culturally dense and ambiguous formats like memes. While people expect larg...
By Hangxiao Zhu, Suliu Qin, Zhuoyan Li, Ming Jiang, Yu Zhang, Meng Xia
AVMeme Exam is a human‑curated benchmark featuring over a thousand iconic Internet audio‑visual clips—including speech, songs, music, and sound effects—each paired with a unique Q&A that probes understanding from surface content to context, emotion, usage, and world knowledge. The benchmark also provides metadata such as original year, transcript, summary, and sensitivity. Evaluations of state‑of‑the‑art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and human participants reveal that current models perform poorly on textless music and sound effects and struggle to think in cultural and contextual terms compared to surface content.
By Xilin Jiang, Qiaolin Wang, Junkai Wu, Xiaomin He, Zhongweiyang Xu, Yinghao Ma, Minshuo Piao, Kaiyi Yang, Xiuwen Zheng, Riki Shimizu, Yicong Chen, Arsalan Firoozi, Gavin Mischler, Sukru Samet Dindar, Richard Antonello, Linyang He, Tsun-An Hsieh, Xulin Fan, Yulun Wu, Yuesheng Ma, Chaitanya Amballa, Weixiong Chen, Jiarui Hai, Ruisi Li, Vishal Choudhari, Cong Han, Yinghao Aaron Li, Adeen Flinker, Mounya Elhilali, Emmanouil Benetos, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Romit Roy Choudhury, Nima Mesgarani
arXiv:2607. 03981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Memes have become influential communication tools on social media, combining viral visuals with concise messaging to convey impactful ideas.
By Fatema Tuj Johora Faria, Mukaffi Bin Moin, Md. Mahfuzur Rahman, Pronay Debnath, Asif Iftekher Fahim, Faisal Muhammad Shah
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
The study investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle diverse Indian oral traditions, using the Rajasthani Pabuji epic, Tamil Sangam poetry, and Bengali folk tales as case studies. By prompting Claude Sonnet and Gemini with 54 generation requests across generic, culturally specific, and regional-language prompts, the authors measured reference drift and cross-tradition convergence using Sentence‑BERT embeddings. Results show that while outputs stay closer to their own tradition than to others, there is significant cross‑tradition similarity (0.52–0.66), indicating partial homogenisation; moreover, regional‑language prompting consistently reduced fidelity to authentic traditions.
By Paarth Singh Rathore
The paper introduces CMPM, a Chinese Multi-Panel Meme benchmark comprising 1,214 annotated samples that capture five structural types, ordering dependencies, panel-order constraints, and optional comment context. It defines a two-layer evaluation: Task 1 tests structure typing and order-sensitive panel sequencing, while Task 2 assesses Chinese meme explanation generation using human ratings across visual, panel, humor, context, and faithfulness dimensions. Benchmarking five large vision‑language models shows that accuracy on canonical displays does not guarantee order understanding, as performance drops sharply under shuffled conditions, and that Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT‑5.5 outperform open models in Task 2, with comment context providing only modest gains.
By Haihan Li, Haihao Li, Zhenfei Xu, Jize Qian
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
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.
By Burak Satar, Zhixin Ma, Cheng Yu-Tong, Huy Hoang Tran, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Chong-Wah Ngo
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...
ChitraMiti introduces a synthetic benchmark of 12,874 Bengali planar geometry problems with structured 15‑attribute descriptions, alongside a complementary set of 500 textbook diagrams. Using a three‑phase protocol that tests diagram‑only, diagram‑plus‑description, and description‑only inputs, the study finds that description‑only performance matches diagram‑plus‑description performance across several VLMs, yet models still struggle with cross‑modal verification. Fine‑tuning on ChitraMiti improves results on both datasets, though a gap remains compared to the best zero‑shot model.
By Khan Raiyan Ibne Reza, Sanjana Aktar Maria, Sumaiya Tabassum Nimi, Md Adnan Arefeen