CulturalMenuBench

CulturalMenuBench: Probing the Knowledge-Application Gap in Multimodal Culinary Reasoning

Paper · Code

Status and permissions

This is the v3 release candidate of CulturalMenuBench, hosted as a Hugging Face dataset repository. The dataset is distributed as three independent ZIP archives (one metadata archive and two media archives). This layout is intended for archive download; the Hugging Face Dataset Viewer and datasets.load_dataset are not supported. Extract the archives into one empty directory and use the included loader.

No dataset license is granted here. Permission to redistribute third-party recipe images, source text and translations remains subject to the authors' rights review and any required institutional approval; see RIGHTS.md. The companion code repository's Apache-2.0 license does not extend to third-party content.

Dataset scope

Suite	Questions
Binary	4,870
Chinese multiple-choice	2,607
Foreign multiple-choice	3,217
Subregion	354
Total	11,048

The candidate contains 587 main dishes and 12,057 physical JPEG images addressed by 12,060 image IDs; three IDs share existing files. All questions and images are included. This is not a sample-only package.

Download and extraction

Download these three independent archives and SHA256SUMS:

• MenuBench_metadata_v3_candidate_20261021.zip
• MenuBench_media_v3_candidate_20261021_01-of-02.zip
• MenuBench_media_v3_candidate_20261021_02-of-02.zip

Do not concatenate the archives. Verify the downloaded files, then extract all three archives into the same empty directory:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS
mkdir data
python3 -m zipfile -e MenuBench_metadata_v3_candidate_20261021.zip data
python3 -m zipfile -e MenuBench_media_v3_candidate_20261021_01-of-02.zip data
python3 -m zipfile -e MenuBench_media_v3_candidate_20261021_02-of-02.zip data
cd data
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS
python3 scripts/load_dataset.py --questions questions/binary.jsonl
python3 scripts/load_dataset.py --questions questions/mc-chinese.jsonl
python3 scripts/load_dataset.py --questions questions/mc-foreign.jsonl
python3 scripts/load_dataset.py --questions questions/subregion.jsonl

For the first checksum command, keep this repository's README.md and RIGHTS.md alongside the three archives. The second checksum command checks the extracted dataset rather than the download files.

Python 3.9+ with the standard library is sufficient for the included loader and scorer. This repository layout is a downloadable archive distribution; it does not promise automatic Hugging Face Dataset Viewer or datasets.load_dataset support. Use the included loader or the code repository's scripts.

Schema and evaluation

questions/*.jsonl contains the four task suites. items.jsonl contains dish metadata, and media_manifest.jsonl resolves asset://image:... references to image files. Preserve ordered question input blocks, including repeated images. Never supply answer labels, source recipe metadata, or review records as model inputs. scripts/score.py provides local scoring; it makes no model API calls.

Version boundary and limitations

Dish display names and their task-specific question spans were cleaned, and non-JPEG parent images were encoded as native-resolution JPEG Q95/4:4:4. Existing JPEG files retain their original bytes. Question IDs, answers, option order, image IDs and image order remain unchanged from the v2 candidate. There is no super-resolution or new image repair in this packaging step.

Earlier image preprocessing includes LaMa/Qwen repair. Neither that processing nor JPEG encoding guarantees watermark-free images; residual or uncertain overlays may remain. Source attribution and preprocessing records are retained inside the metadata archive, not discarded to make this bundle smaller.

This revised candidate has not been reevaluated. Historical paper scores must not be presented as results measured on these revised inputs. KNOWN_ISSUES.jsonl retains eight answer-change proposals and 21 scope proposals; they have not been applied. See the extracted README.md, RELEASE.json, and preprocessing/name-review records for detailed version information.

Distribution

The dataset is hosted at https://huggingface.co/datasets/brainz/CulturalMenuBench. Keep the three ZIP archives, README.md, RIGHTS.md and SHA256SUMS together at the repository root; the outer transport ZIP is not part of the dataset and should not be uploaded as a fourth archive.

For updates, preserve the archive layout and refresh SHA256SUMS, then re-run the extraction and loader checks. Any change to visibility or redistribution scope must be consistent with RIGHTS.md, including attribution, public contact and takedown information.