RAVENEA: A Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Visual Culture Understanding

As vision-language models (VLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, the need for accurate visual culture understanding is becoming critical. Yet, these models frequently fall short in interpreting cultural nuances effectively. Prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in enhancing cultural understanding in text-only settings, while its application in multimodal scenarios remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce RAVENEA (Retrieval-Augmented Visual culturE uNdErstAnding), a new benchmark designed to advance visual culture understanding through retrieval, focusing on two tasks: culture-focused visual question answering (cVQA) and culture-informed image captioning (cIC). RAVENEA extends existing datasets by integrating over 10,000 unique Wikipedia documents curated and ranked by human annotators. Through the extensive evaluation on seven multimodal retrievers and fifteen VLMs, RAVENEA reveals some undiscovered findings: (i) In general, cultural grounding annotations can enhance multimodal retrieval and corresponding downstream tasks. (ii) Lightweight VLMs, when augmented with culture-aware retrieval, outperform their non-augmented counterparts (by at least 3.2% on cVQA and 6.2% on cIC). (iii) Performance varies widely across countries, with culture-aware retrieval augmented VLMs showing more stable results on Korean and Chinese contexts than in the other countries. These findings highlight the critical limitations of current multimodal retrievers and VLMs, and underscore the need to enhance RAG visual culture understanding. Our RAVENEA can serve as a foundational tool for advancing the study of RAG visual culture understanding of multimodal AI.