{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/beyond-aesthetics-cultural-competence-in-text","title":"Beyond Aesthetics: Cultural Competence in Text-to-Image Models","arxiv_id":"2407.06863","date":"2024-07-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nithish Kannen","Arif Ahmad","Marco Andreetto","Vinodkumar Prabhakaran","Utsav Prabhu","Adji Bousso Dieng","Pushpak Bhattacharyya","Shachi Dave"],"abstract":"Text-to-Image (T2I) models are being increasingly adopted in diverse global communities where they create visual representations of their unique cultures. Current T2I benchmarks primarily focus on faithfulness, aesthetics, and realism of generated images, overlooking the critical dimension of cultural competence. In this work, we introduce a framework to evaluate cultural competence of T2I models along two crucial dimensions: cultural awareness and cultural diversity, and present a scalable approach using a combination of structured knowledge bases and large language models to build a large dataset of cultural artifacts to enable this evaluation. In particular, we apply this approach to build CUBE (CUltural BEnchmark for Text-to-Image models), a first-of-its-kind benchmark to evaluate cultural competence of T2I models. CUBE covers cultural artifacts associated with 8 countries across different geo-cultural regions and along 3 concepts: cuisine, landmarks, and art. CUBE consists of 1) CUBE-1K, a set of high-quality prompts that enable the evaluation of cultural awareness, and 2) CUBE-CSpace, a larger dataset of cultural artifacts that serves as grounding to evaluate cultural diversity. We also introduce cultural diversity as a novel T2I evaluation component, leveraging quality-weighted Vendi score. Our evaluations reveal significant gaps in the cultural awareness of existing models across countries and provide valuable insights into the cultural diversity of T2I outputs for under-specified prompts. Our methodology is extendable to other cultural regions and concepts, and can facilitate the development of T2I models that better cater to the global population.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06863v6","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.06863v6.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"beyond-aesthetics-cultural-competence-in-text","repo_url":"https://github.com/google-deepmind/cube","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}},{"paper_slug":"beyond-aesthetics-cultural-competence-in-text","repo_url":"https://github.com/google-research-datasets/cube","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"CC-BY-4.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"},{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2407.06863","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2407.06863"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/google-deepmind/cube","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/google-research-datasets/cube","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"CC-BY-4.0"}}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"f999bc22fedefec3","entry":"create_root_cache_nodes","repo":"google-deepmind/cube","repo_kind":"official","path":"cube_extraction/create_root_cache.py","file_url":"https://github.com/google-deepmind/cube/blob/HEAD/cube_extraction/create_root_cache.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"f999bc22fedefec3"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}