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arXiv · 2510.00041

Culture In a Frame: C$^3$B as a Comic-Based Benchmark for Multimodal Culturally Awareness

Yuchen Song·Andong Chen·Wenxin Zhu·Kehai Chen·Xuefeng Bai·Muyun Yang·Tiejun Zhao
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Abstract

Cultural awareness capabilities have emerged as a critical capability for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, current benchmarks lack progressed difficulty in their task design and are deficient in cross-lingual tasks. Moreover, current benchmarks often use real-world images. Each real-world image typically contains one culture, making these benchmarks relatively easy for MLLMs. Based on this, we propose C$^3$B (Comics Cross-Cultural Benchmark), a novel multicultural, multitask and multilingual cultural awareness capabilities benchmark. C$^3$B comprises over 2000 images and over 18000 QA pairs, constructed on three tasks with progressed difficulties, from basic visual recognition to higher-level cultural conflict understanding, and finally to cultural content generation. We conducted evaluations on 11 open-source MLLMs, revealing a significant performance gap between MLLMs and human performance. The gap demonstrates that C$^3$B poses substantial challenges for current MLLMs, encouraging future research to advance the cultural awareness capabilities of MLLMs.

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Yuchen Song, Andong Chen, Wenxin Zhu, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai, Muyun Yang, Tiejun Zhao. 2025-09-27. Culture In a Frame: C$^3$B as a Comic-Based Benchmark for Multimodal Culturally Awareness. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00041

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