A Unified Framework to Quantify Cultural Intelligence of AI

As generative AI technologies are increasingly being launched across the globe, assessing their competence to operate in different cultural contexts is exigently becoming a priority. While recent years have seen numerous and much-needed efforts on cultural benchmarking, these efforts have largely focused on specific aspects of culture and evaluation. While these efforts contribute to our understanding of cultural competence, a unified and systematic evaluation approach is needed for us as a field to comprehensively assess diverse cultural dimensions at scale. Drawing on measurement theory, we present a principled framework to aggregate multifaceted indicators of cultural capabilities into a unified assessment of cultural intelligence. We start by developing a working definition of culture that includes identifying core domains of culture. We then introduce a broad-purpose, systematic, and extensible framework for assessing cultural intelligence of AI systems. Drawing on theoretical framing from psychometric measurement validity theory, we decouple the background concept (i.e., cultural intelligence) from its operationalization via measurement. We conceptualize cultural intelligence as a suite of core capabilities spanning diverse domains, which we then operationalize through a set of indicators designed for reliable measurement. Finally, we identify the considerations, challenges, and research pathways to meaningfully measure these indicators, specifically focusing on data collection, probing strategies, and evaluation metrics.

Cultural Compass: A Framework for Organizing Societal Norms to Detect Violations in Human-AI Conversations

Generative AI models ought to be useful and safe across cross-cultural contexts. One critical step toward this goal is understanding how AI models adhere to sociocultural norms. While this challenge has gained attention in NLP, existing work lacks both nuance and coverage in understanding and evaluating models' norm adherence. We address these gaps by introducing a taxonomy of norms that clarifies their contexts (e.g., distinguishing between human-human norms that models should recognize and human-AI interactional norms that apply to the human-AI interaction itself), specifications (e.g., relevant domains), and mechanisms (e.g., modes of enforcement). We demonstrate how our taxonomy can be operationalized to automatically evaluate models' norm adherence in naturalistic, open-ended settings. Our exploratory analyses suggest that state-of-the-art models frequently violate norms, though violation rates vary by model, interactional context, and country. We further show that violation rates also vary by prompt intent and situational framing. Our taxonomy and demonstrative evaluation pipeline enable nuanced, context-sensitive evaluation of cultural norm adherence in realistic settings.

Distributed Global Structure-from-Motion with a Deep Front-End

While initial approaches to Structure-from-Motion (SfM) revolved around both global and incremental methods, most recent applications rely on incremental systems to estimate camera poses due to their superior robustness. Though there has been tremendous progress in SfM `front-ends' powered by deep models learned from data, the state-of-the-art (incremental) SfM pipelines still rely on classical SIFT features, developed in 2004. In this work, we investigate whether leveraging the developments in feature extraction and matching helps global SfM perform on par with the SOTA incremental SfM approach (COLMAP). To do so, we design a modular SfM framework that allows us to easily combine developments in different stages of the SfM pipeline. Our experiments show that while developments in deep-learning based two-view correspondence estimation do translate to improvements in point density for scenes reconstructed with global SfM, none of them outperform SIFT when comparing with incremental SfM results on a range of datasets. Our SfM system is designed from the ground up to leverage distributed computation, enabling us to parallelize computation on multiple machines and scale to large scenes.