Crossroads of Continents: Automated Artifact Extraction for Cultural Adaptation with Large Multimodal Models

We present a comprehensive three-phase study to ex-amine (1) the cultural understanding of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) by introducing Dalle Street, a large-scale dataset generated by DALL-E 3 and validated by hu-mans, containing 9, 935 images of 67 countries and 10 concept classes, (2) the underlying implicit and potentially stereotypical cultural associations with a cultural artifact extraction task, and (3) an approach to adapt cultural representation in an image based on extracted associations using a modular pipeline, Cultureadapt. We find disparities in cultural understanding at geographic sub-region levels with both open-source (LLaVA) and closed-source (GPT-4V) models on Dalle Street and other existing benchmarks, which we try to understand using over 18, 000 artifacts that we identify in association to different coun-tries. Our findings reveal a nuanced picture of the cultural competence of LMMs, highlighting the need to develop culture-aware systems.¹¹Dataset and code are available: https://github.com/iamshnoo/crossroads