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arXiv · 2512.01419

Rice-VL: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Cultural Understanding Across ASEAN Countries

Tushar Pranav·Eshan Pandey·Austria Lyka Diane Bala·Aman Chadha·Indriyati Atmosukarto·Donny Soh Cheng Lock
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Abstract

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in multimodal tasks but often exhibit Western-centric biases, limiting their effectiveness in culturally diverse regions like Southeast Asia (SEA). To address this, we introduce RICE-VL, a novel benchmark evaluating VLM cultural understanding across 11 ASEAN countries. RICE-VL includes over 28,000 human-curated Visual Question Answering (VQA) samples -- covering True or False, Fill-in-the-Blank, and open-ended formats -- and 1,000 image-bounding box pairs for Visual Grounding, annotated by culturally informed experts across 14 sub-ground categories. We propose SEA-LAVE, an extension of the LAVE metric, assessing textual accuracy, cultural alignment, and country identification. Evaluations of six open- and closed-source VLMs reveal significant performance gaps in low-resource countries and abstract cultural domains. The Visual Grounding task tests models' ability to localize culturally significant elements in complex scenes, probing spatial and contextual accuracy. RICE-VL exposes limitations in VLMs' cultural comprehension and highlights the need for inclusive model development to better serve diverse global populations.

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Tushar Pranav, Eshan Pandey, Austria Lyka Diane Bala, Aman Chadha, Indriyati Atmosukarto, Donny Soh Cheng Lock. 2025-12-01. Rice-VL: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Cultural Understanding Across ASEAN Countries. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01419

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