Many Dialects, Many Languages, One Cultural Lens: Evaluating Multilingual VLMs for Bengali Culture Understanding Across Historically Linked Languages and Regional Dialects

arXiv:2603.21165 · cs.CL, cs.CV · Submitted 2026-03-22 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.CV

Submitted: 2026-03-22

Updated: 2026-08-27

Comments: Accepted at EMNLP 2026 (Findings)

Project page: https://labib1610.github.io/BanglaVerse

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Accuracy — 48× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 35× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 12× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Visual Question Answering — 12× in this paper
• LLM-as-a-Judge — 10× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 6× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Visual Grounding — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Consistency — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Annotator Agreement — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmarking — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fidelity — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• In-Context Learning — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Robustness — 2× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Standard Error — 2× in this paper
• Structured Reasoning — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Actor — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought (CoT) — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought Prompting — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• LLM judge — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• LoRA Adapters — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) — 1× in this paper · explained in 9 episodes
• Multimodal Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Redundancy — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Score Function — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Semantic Similarity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Tokenization — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Vision-Language Models (VLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• alpha — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode

Sources

• ChitroJera: A Regionally Relevant Visual Question Answering Dataset for Bangla
• IndicVisionBench: Benchmarking Cultural and Multilingual Understanding in VLMs
• CultureVLM: Characterizing and Improving Cultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models for over 100 Countries
• DRISHTIKON: A Multimodal Multilingual Benchmark for Testing Language Models' Understanding on Indian Culture

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