Saadia Gabriel

AI systems are used worldwide, but they struggle to serve the needs of culturally diverse populations. Prior work on cultural understanding evaluates AI systems on text-only settings or on visual artifact recognition (e.g. foods, clothing). The ability to reason about visually observable behaviors through local social norms, which we call visual norm understanding, remains unexamined. We introduce NormViz-Bench, a high quality, human-validated benchmark of 3,272 contrastive image pairs (6,544 images) spanning 16 countries. Each pair varies only in the culturally relevant behavior (e.g., objects, attributes, spatial relations, and actions) that alters how each image is interpreted. Each image is labeled as conforming to, violating, or irrelevant to local social norms, and pair-level evaluation requires both images to be correctly classified, thereby preventing reliance on superficial visual shortcuts. Even the strongest VLMs, Gemini 3.0 Flash and Qwen2.5 VL 7B, succeed on only 25.3% and 23.0% of pairs, struggling most with identifying violating and culturally benign visual behaviors. Towards bridging this, we introduce NormViz-Train, a training dataset of 64k images paired with explanations. Though absolute performance remains low (<30%), finetuning on NormViz-Train improves pair accuracy relatively by up to 86% and 36% for Qwen3-VL 4B and 8B respectively, showing a path forward to teach models to connect visual perception to cultural significance. Together, NormViz-Bench and NormViz-Train establish visual norm understanding as a challenging and consequential frontier for multimodal AI.

A significant challenge in agentic AI is prospective memory: the ability to execute an intention at a specific future cue or state while other activities are ongoing. We introduce PM-Bench, a text-based benchmark for measuring prospective memory capabilities in modern LLM agents. Inspired by the Virtual Week paradigm from cognitive science, PM-Bench evaluates how well LLM agents maintain user intentions, execute delayed intentions, and monitor latent environment changes. Over the course of a simulated seven-day week, agents must continue an ongoing activity while deciding whether any deferred task is due. We compare eight state-of-the-art LLMs on PM-Bench under eight different agent configurations. PM-Bench proves challenging across all settings: the best method, a GPT-5.4 agent, reaches only 65.1% F1 score under our evaluation. Furthermore, no single strategy for improving prospective memory dominates across models. We release PM-Bench as a controlled testbed for diagnosing these failures and developing training or inference-time interventions that support reliable prospective behavior.

Despite representing nearly one-third of the world’s languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational linguistics. We present the African Languages Lab (All Lab), a compre...