Cultural Moment Benchmark: Evaluating Video Cultural Reasoning and Grounding in Southeast Asia

Burak Satar, Zhixin Ma, Cheng Yu-Tong, Huy Hoang Tran, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Chong-Wah Ngo

Three-stage video probes of cultural understanding across Southeast Asia: naming a concept, recognizing it among unlabeled video moments, and locating its sub-events in time.

arXivProject site

What it covers

306 expert-curated concepts from seven Southeast Asian countries across five categories, evaluated over 624 videos in a 3-stage × 3-mode framework. Cultural understanding is scored as three separate abilities rather than one number, and the abilities do not compose: even the strongest closed-source models clear all three stages for fewer than 30% of concepts, and a 14-rater human study shows the knowledge required is country-specific, not regional.

Try the interactive walkthrough on the project page, where the leaderboard and challenge details also live. The paper appears at the EMNLP 2026 Main Conference (15.4% acceptance rate); the ACL Anthology version will be linked here once published.

Related

It builds on Seeing Culture (EMNLP 2025), which asks the same two-stage question — reason about a cultural artifact, then ground it in the image — of still images rather than video. Cultural Moment carries the visual-option design into video and adds free-form temporal localization.

@misc{satar2026cultural,
    title={Cultural Moment Benchmark: Evaluating Video Cultural Reasoning and Grounding in Southeast Asia},
    author={Burak Satar and Zhixin Ma and Yu-Tong Cheng and Huy Hoang Tran and Phuong Anh Nguyen and Chong-Wah Ngo},
    year={2026},
    eprint={2608.23065},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23065}
}