Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Title

Proceedings of the International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference, FLAIRS

Abstract

Visual icons are widely used in user interfaces and multimodal AI systems, yet their interpretation often varies across cultural contexts. Symbols that appear universal may convey different meanings depending on social norms and cultural conventions. We introduce CultIcon-Bench, a pilot benchmark designed to study culturally grounded interpretation of visual icons. The benchmark pairs icon-like visual symbols with short textual contexts and cultural identifiers, enabling controlled evaluation of whether a model correctly interprets the intended meaning under different cultural settings. The dataset is organized around a taxonomy of cultural conflict classes including gestures, politeness norms, privacy expectations, religion, holidays, rituals, dress codes, and culturally dependent humor. We construct the dataset using a prompt-seeded generation pipeline followed by manual filtering to identify culturally ambiguous scenarios. Preliminary baseline experiments using mBERT and a multimodal CLIP zero-shot model illustrate how culturally conditioned evaluation can reveal performance differences across cultural groups that are not visible through aggregate metrics. © 2026, Florida Online Journals, University of Florida. All rights reserved.

DOI

10.32473/flairs.39.1.141643

Publication Date

2026

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