Yi Zhou

Genta Indra Winata, Frederikus Hudi, Patrick Amadeus Irawan et al.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with culture-specific knowledge, particularly in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. To evaluate their understanding of such knowledge, we introduce WorldCuisines, a massive-scale benchmark for multilingual and multicultural, visually grounded language understanding. This benchmark includes a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects, spanning 9 language families and featuring over 1 million data points, making it the largest multicultural VQA benchmark to date. It includes tasks for identifying dish names and their origins. We provide evaluation datasets in two sizes (12k and 60k instances) alongside a training dataset (1 million instances). Our findings show that while VLMs perform better with correct location context, they struggle with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages. To support future research, we release a knowledge base with annotated food entries and images along with the VQA data.

Tianhui Zhang, Yi Zhou, Danushka Bollegala

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has gained popularity as a method for conveniently incorporating novel facts that were not seen during the pre-training stage in Large Language Model (LLM)-based Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. However, LLMs are known to encode significant levels of unfair social biases. The modulation of these biases by RAG in NLG systems is not well understood. In this paper, we systematically study the relationship between the different components of a RAG system and the social biases presented in the text generated across three languages (i.e. English, Japanese and Chinese) and four social bias types (i.e. gender, race, age and religion). Specifically, using the Bias Question Answering (BBQ) benchmark datasets, we evaluate the social biases in RAG responses from document collections with varying levels of stereotypical biases, employing multiple LLMs used as generators. We find that the biases in document collections are often amplified in the generated responses, even when the generating LLM exhibits a low-level of bias. Our findings raise concerns about the use of RAG as a technique for injecting novel facts into NLG systems and call for careful evaluation of potential social biases in RAG applications before their real-world deployment.