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Joan Nwatu

5 accepted papers

2026

Culture Affordance Atlas: Reconciling Object Diversity Through Functional Mapping

AAAI 2026technical

Culture shapes the objects people use and for what purposes, yet mainstream Vision-Language (VL) datasets frequently exhibit cultural biases, disproportionately favoring higher-income, Western contexts. This imbalance reduces model generalizability and perpetuates performance disparities, especially

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Uplifting Lower-Income Data: Strategies for Socioeconomic Perspective Shifts in Large Multi-modal Models

NAACL 2025long

Recent work has demonstrated that the unequal representation of cultures and socioeconomic groups in training data leads to biased Large Multi-modal (LMM) models. To improve LMM model performance on underrepresented data, we propose and evaluate several prompting strategies using non-English, geogra…

2025

Why AI Is WEIRD and Shouldn't Be This Way: Towards AI for Everyone, with Everyone, by Everyone

AAAI 2025technical

This paper presents a vision for creating AI systems that are inclusive at every stage of development, from data collection to model design and evaluation. We address key limitations in the current AI pipeline and its WEIRD* representation, such as lack of data diversity, biases in model performance…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

NeurIPS 2024oral

Visual Question Answering~(VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, which requires models to understand and reason on knowledge present in visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA datasets and models are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images th…

Cited by 34SourcePDFScholar
2023

Bridging the Digital Divide: Performance Variation across Socio-Economic Factors in Vision-Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

Despite the impressive performance of current AI models reported across various tasks, performance reports often do not include evaluations of how these models perform on the specific groups that will be impacted by these technologies. Among the minority groups under-represented in AI, data from low…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar