Papers by Mehar Bhatia
From Local Concepts to Universals: Evaluating the Multicultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown emerging capabilities through large-scale training that have made them gain popularity in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform retrieval across universals and cultural visual grounding tasks to assess cultural diversity across universal and culture-specific local concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform significantly across cultures, underscoring the need for enhancing multicultural understanding in vision-language models. |
CulturalBench: A Robust, Diverse and Challenging Benchmark for Measuring LMs’ Cultural Knowledge Through Human-AI Red-Teaming (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Ying Chiu, Liwei Jiang, Bill Yuchen Lin, Chan Young Park, Shuyue Stella Li, Sahithya Ravi, Mehar Bhatia, Maria Antoniak, Yulia Tsvetkov, Vered Shwartz, Yejin Choi
| Challenge: | CulturalBench is a set of 1,696 human-written and human-verified questions to assess LMs’ cultural knowledge covering 45 global regions including underrepresented ones like Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, and Peru. |
| Approach: | They construct a set of 1,696 human-written and human-verified questions to assess LMs' cultural knowledge, covering 45 global regions including underrepresented ones like Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, and Peru. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other models across cultures, while underperforming on questions related to North Africa, South America and Middle East. |
CulturalFrames: Assessing Cultural Expectation Alignment in Text-to-Image Models and Evaluation Metrics (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shravan Nayak, Mehar Bhatia, Xiaofeng Zhang, Verena Rieser, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Sjoerd Van Steenkiste, Yash Goyal, Karolina Stanczak, Aishwarya Agrawal
| Challenge: | CulturalFrames is a benchmark designed for rigorous human evaluation of cultural representation in visual generations. |
| Approach: | They propose to quantify the alignment of T2I models and evaluation metrics with respect to both explicit (stated) and implicit (unstated, implied by the prompt’s cultural context) cultural expectations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 983 prompts, 3637 images and 10k human annotations from 10 countries and 5 socio-cultural domains. |
GD-COMET: A Geo-Diverse Commonsense Inference Model (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | GD-COMET is a geo-diverse version of the COMET commonsense inference model . it captures and generates culturally nuanced commonsensense knowledge . lack of cultural awareness may lead to models perpetuating stereotypes and reinforcing societal inequalities for users from non-Western countries. |
| Approach: | They propose a geo-diverse version of COMET commonsense reasoning model that generates inferences pertaining to a broad range of cultures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates inferences pertaining to a broad range of cultures and is culturally nuanced. |