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

Nurul Labib Sayeedi, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Shubhashis Roy Dipta +6

Bangla culture is richly expressed through region, dialect, history, food, politics, media, and everyday visual life, yet it remains underrepresented in multimodal evaluation. To a…