Finding Culture-Sensitive Neurons in Vision-Language Models

📝 Original Info

• Title: Finding Culture-Sensitive Neurons in Vision-Language Models
• ArXiv ID: 2510.24942
• Date: 2025-10-28
• Authors: ** 논문에 명시된 저자 정보가 제공되지 않았습니다. (저자명 및 소속을 확인하려면 원문을 참고하십시오.) **

📝 Abstract

Despite their impressive performance, vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle on culturally situated inputs. To understand how VLMs process culturally grounded information, we study the presence of culture-sensitive neurons, i.e. neurons whose activations show preferential sensitivity to inputs associated with particular cultural contexts. We examine whether such neurons are important for culturally diverse visual question answering and where they are located. Using the CVQA benchmark, we identify neurons of culture selectivity and perform causal tests by deactivating the neurons flagged by different identification methods. Experiments on three VLMs across 25 cultural groups demonstrate the existence of neurons whose ablation disproportionately harms performance on questions about the corresponding cultures, while having minimal effects on others. Moreover, we propose a new margin-based selector - Contrastive Activation Selection (CAS), and show that it outperforms existing probability- and entropy-based methods in identifying culture-sensitive neurons. Finally, our layer-wise analyses reveals that such neurons tend to cluster in certain decoder layers. Overall, our findings shed new light on the internal organization of multimodal representations.

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