This work was an amazing collaboration with @nolauren.bsky.social @mariaa.bsky.social @taylor-arnold.bsky.social @jiaangli.bsky.social Siddhesh Pawar, Antonia Karamolegkou, @scfrank.bsky.social @zhaochongan.bsky.social Negar Rostamzadeh, @danielhers.bsky.social @serge.belongie.com Ekaterina Shutova

We find that decades of visual cultural studies offer powerful ways to decode cultural meaning in images!! Rather than proposing yet another benchmark, our goal with this paper was to revisit and re-contextualize foundational theories of culture so that it can pave way for more inclusive frameworks.

We then propose 5 frameworks to evaluate cultures in VLMs:
1️⃣ Processual Grounding - who defines culture?
2️⃣ Material Culture - what is represented?
3️⃣ Symbolic Encoding - how is meaning layered?
4️⃣ Contextual Interpretation - who understands and frames meaning?
5️⃣ Temporality -when is culture situated?

In this paper, we call for integrating methods from 3 fields :
📚 Cultural Studies – how values, beliefs & identities are shaped through cultural forms like images.
🔍 Semiotics – how signs & symbols convey meaning
🎨 Visual Studies – how visuals communicate across time & place

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often fail at cultural understanding. But culture isn’t just recognizing things like food, clothes, rituals etc. It's how meaning is made and understood; it also about symbolism, context, and how these things evolve over time.