We’re excited to announce a major milestone from the SEACrowd team—the launch of SEA-VL, the largest open-source vision-language (VL) dataset specifically designed to represent the cultural diversity of Southeast Asia 🇧🇳🇰🇭🇹🇱🇮🇩🇱🇦🇲🇾🇲🇲🇵🇭🇸🇬🇹🇭🇻🇳.
📄 Read the Paper
We’ve published our full methodology and findings on arXiv:
📜 Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia
🔗 SEA-VL Dataset on Hugging Face: Explore SEA-VL
🔍 Why SEA-VL?
Most vision-language datasets today reflect Western-centric imagery and language, leaving Southeast Asian cultures underrepresented and misinterpreted.
SEA-VL is our open-source initiative to change that—designed to better represent the languages, traditions, and everyday realities of Southeast Asian communities.
📊 Highlights
- 📸 1.3 million culturally relevant image-text pairs
- 🌏 Covers all 11 Southeast Asian countries
- 🗃️ 50× larger than any previous SEA-focused VL dataset
- 🔗 Hosted on Hugging Face: Explore SEA-VL
🛠️ How We Built SEA-VL
We combined several approaches to balance scale with cultural fidelity:
- Crowdsourcing — High cultural accuracy, but slow and resource-intensive
- Image Crawling — ~85% cultural relevance and highly scalable
- Image Generation — Still fails to reflect SEA cultures authentically and poses licensing challenges
💡 Why This Matters
- ✅ AI trained on SEA-VL understands local contexts, languages, and traditions
- ✅ Community contributions prevent cultural misrepresentation or erasure
- ✅ We empower Southeast Asian communities to shape how AI sees the region
📣 Help Us Spread the Word
We’ve announced SEA-VL on our social channels—please reshare and help us grow!
| 🐦 Twitter/X | 🦋 Bluesky |
👏 What’s Next?
We extend our deepest thanks to the contributors across Southeast Asia who made this possible.
This is only the beginning—Phase 2 is on the horizon, and we invite researchers, practitioners, and community members to collaborate with us. Stay tuned on our Discord!
Together, let’s build AI that reflects the full spectrum of human culture for Southeast Asia.
