On the Cultural Anachronism and Temporal Reasoning in Vision Language Models
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly applied to cultural heritage materials, from digital archives to educational platforms. This work identifies a fundamental issue in how these models interpret historical artifacts. We define this phenomenon as cultural anachronism, the tendency to misinterpret historical objects using temporally inappropriate concepts, materials, or cultural frameworks. To quantify this phenomenon, we introduce the Temporal Anachronism Benchmark for Vision-Language Models (TAB-VLM), a dataset of 600 questions across six categories, designed to evaluate temporal reasoning on 1,600 Indian cultural artifacts spanning prehistoric to modern periods. Systematic eva...
| Authors | Mukul Ranjan, Prince Jha, Khushboo Kumari et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 14 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 May 2026 |
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