GIMMICK -- Globally Inclusive Multimodal Multitask Cultural Knowledge Benchmarking

TL;DR

This paper introduces GIMMICK, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating large vision-language models' understanding of diverse cultural knowledge across 144 countries, revealing biases and performance patterns.

Contribution

GIMMICK is the first extensive multimodal benchmark assessing cultural knowledge across many countries and cultural aspects, enabling systematic evaluation of LVLMs.

Findings

Models show strong Western cultural biases.

Model size correlates with performance.

Multimodal input improves cultural understanding.

Abstract

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently gained attention due to their distinctive performance and broad applicability. While it has been previously shown that their efficacy in usage scenarios involving non-Western contexts falls short, existing studies are limited in scope, covering just a narrow range of cultures, focusing exclusively on a small number of cultural aspects, or evaluating a limited selection of models on a single task only. Towards globally inclusive LVLM research, we introduce GIMMICK, an extensive multimodal benchmark designed to assess a broad spectrum of cultural knowledge across 144 countries representing six global macro-regions. GIMMICK comprises six tasks built upon three new datasets that span 728 unique cultural events or facets on which we evaluated 20 LVLMs and 11 LLMs, including five proprietary and 26 open-weight models of all sizes. We systematically examine (1) regional cultural biases, (2) the influence of model size, (3) input modalities, and (4) external cues. Our analyses reveal strong biases toward Western cultures across models and tasks and highlight strong correlations between model size and performance, as well as the effectiveness of multimodal input and external geographic cues. We further find that models have more knowledge of tangible than intangible aspects (e.g., food vs. rituals) and that they excel in recognizing broad cultural origins but struggle with a more nuanced understanding.