Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia
Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Tack Hwa Wong, Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, Thant Thiri Maung, Frederikus Hudi, David Anugraha
Abstract
Despite Southeast Asia’s (SEA) extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, the region remains significantly underrepresented in vision-language (VL) research, resulting in AI models that inadequately capture SEA cultural nuances. To fill this gap, we present SEA-VL, an open-source initiative dedicated to developing culturally relevant high-quality datasets for SEA languages. By involving contributors from SEA countries, SEA-VL ensures better cultural relevance and diversity, fostering greater inclusivity of underrepresented languages and cultural depictions in VL research. Our methodology employed three approaches: community-driven crowdsourcing with SEA contributors, automated image crawling, and synthetic image generation. We evaluated each method’s effectiveness in capturing cultural relevance. We found that image crawling achieves approximately ~85% cultural relevance while being more cost- and time-efficient than crowdsourcing, whereas synthetic image generation failed to accurately reflect SEA cultural nuances and contexts. Collectively, we gathered 1.28 million SEA culturally relevant images, more than 50 times larger than other existing datasets. This work bridges the representation gap in SEA, establishes a foundation for developing culturally aware AI systems for this region, and provides a replicable framework for addressing representation gaps in other underrepresented regions.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{cahyawijaya-etal-2025-crowdsource,
title = "Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating {SEA}-{VL}, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for {S}outheast {A}sia",
author = {Cahyawijaya, Samuel and
Lovenia, Holy and
Moniz, Joel Ruben Antony and
Wong, Tack Hwa and
Farhansyah, Mohammad Rifqi and
Maung, Thant Thiri and
Hudi, Frederikus and
Anugraha, David and
Habibi, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan and
Qorib, Muhammad Reza and
Agarwal, Amit and
Imperial, Joseph Marvin and
Patel, Hitesh Laxmichand and
Feliren, Vicky and
Nasution, Bahrul Ilmi and
Rufino, Manuel Antonio and
Winata, Genta Indra and
Rajagede, Rian Adam and
Catalan, Carlos Rafael and
Imam, Mohamed Fazli Mohamed and
Pattnayak, Priyaranjan and
Pranida, Salsabila Zahirah and
Pratama, Kevin and
Bangera, Yeshil and
Na-Thalang, Adisai and
Monderin, Patricia Nicole and
Song, Yueqi and
Simon, Christian and
Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian and
Sapan, Richardy Lobo and
Rafi, Taki Hasan and
Wang, Bin and
Supryadi and
Veerakanjana, Kanyakorn and
Ittichaiwong, Piyalitt and
Roque, Matthew Theodore and
Vincentio, Karissa and
Kreangphet, Takdanai and
Artkaew, Phakphum and
Palgunadi, Kadek Hendrawan and
Yu, Yanzhi and
Hastuti, Rochana Prih and
Nixon, William and
Bangera, Mithil and
Lim, Adrian Xuan Wei and
Khine, Aye Hninn and
Zhafran, Hanif Muhammad and
Ferdinan, Teddy and
Izzani, Audra Aurora and
Singh, Ayushman and
Evan, Evan and
Krito, Jauza Akbar and
Anugraha, Michael and
Ilasariya, Fenal Ashokbhai and
Li, Haochen and
Daniswara, John Amadeo and
Tjiaranata, Filbert Aurelian and
Yulianrifat, Eryawan Presma and
Udomcharoenchaikit, Can and
Ansori, Fadil Risdian and
Ihsani, Mahardika Krisna and
Nguyen, Giang and
Barik, Anab Maulana and
Velasco, Dan John and
Genadi, Rifo Ahmad and
Saha, Saptarshi and
Wei, Chengwei and
Flores, Isaiah Edri W. and
Han, Kenneth Chen Ko and
Santos, Anjela Gail D. and
Lim, Wan Shen and
Phyo, Kaung Si and
Santos, Tim and
Dwiastuti, Meisyarah and
Luo, Jiayun and
Cruz, Jan Christian Blaise and
Hee, Ming Shan and
Hanif, Ikhlasul Akmal and
Hakim, M.Alif Al and
Sya{'}ban, Muhammad Rizky and
Kerdthaisong, Kun and
Miranda, Lester James Validad and
Koto, Fajri and
Fatyanosa, Tirana Noor and
Aji, Alham Fikri and
Rosal, Jostin Jerico and
Kevin, Jun and
Wijaya, Robert and
Kampman, Onno P. and
Zhang, Ruochen and
Karlsson, B{\"o}rje F. and
Limkonchotiwat, Peerat},
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.916/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.916",
pages = "18685--18717",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}