Burak Satar

Burak Satar

Research Scientist at SMU. Making vision-language models culturally aware. PhD graduate from NTU.

Visually Grounded Augmentation for Reasoning Segmentation of Cultural Artifacts

Published in ACM TOMM (under review), 2026

Zhixin Ma*, Burak Satar*, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Chong-Wah Ngo (* equal contribution)

Visually grounded augmentation for reasoning segmentation, so a model segments cultural artifacts from what it sees rather than from surface cues.

Status

This work is under review. There is no preprint yet; a link will appear here when one is available.

For a draft, or to discuss the work, email me or book a 30-minute chat.

Part of the same line of work as Seeing Culture (EMNLP 2025) and the Cultural Moment benchmark, which ask whether a model reasons about a cultural artifact or only sounds confident about it. This one pushes the grounding requirement from a bounding box to a segmentation mask.