CulturalMenuBench: Probing the Knowledge-Application Gap in Multimodal Culinary Reasoning

arXiv cs.AISeptember 4, 2026en

arXiv:2609.03526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal language models achieve near-ceiling scores on food recognition benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether this success reflects genuine cultural understanding or mere visual matching. To probe this distinction, we introduce CulturalMenuBench, a benchmark of 4,870 items in 10 languages across 18 regions; its 10 tasks pair final-dish and step-by-step cooking images with ingredients, procedural text, and regional labels, spanning basic recognition to process-grounded cultural attribution. Evaluating 12 models exposes a substantial knowledge-application gap: models exceeding 94% on standard multiple-choice tasks drop to at most 56% when

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