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Memes are popular in the modern world and are distributed primarily for entertainment. However, harmful ideologies such as misogyny can be propagated through innocent-looking memes. The detection and understanding of why a meme is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Kushal Kanwar , Dushyant Singh Chauhan , Gopendra Vikram Singh , Asif Ekbal

In the digital world, memes present a unique challenge for content moderation due to their potential to spread harmful content. Although detection methods have improved, proactive solutions such as intervention are still limited, with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Prince Jha , Raghav Jain , Konika Mandal , Aman Chadha , Sriparna Saha , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

The proliferation of memes on social media necessitates the capabilities of multimodal Large Language Models (mLLMs) to effectively understand multimodal harmfulness. Existing evaluation approaches predominantly focus on mLLMs' detection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Zixin Chen , Hongzhan Lin , Kaixin Li , Ziyang Luo , Yayue Deng , Jing Ma

Memes have emerged as a popular form of multimodal online communication, where their interpretation heavily depends on the specific context in which they appear. Current approaches predominantly focus on isolated meme analysis, either for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Zhengyi Zhao , Shubo Zhang , Yuxi Zhang , Yanxi Zhao , Yifan Zhang , Zezhong Wang , Huimin Wang , Yutian Zhao , Bin Liang , Yefeng Zheng , Binyang Li , Kam-Fai Wong , Xian Wu

Memes are graphics and text overlapped so that together they present concepts that become dubious if one of them is absent. It is spread mostly on social media platforms, in the form of jokes, sarcasm, motivating, etc. After the success of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Tariq Habib Afridi , Aftab Alam , Muhammad Numan Khan , Jawad Khan , Young-Koo Lee

In this work, we examine hateful memes from three complementary angles - how to detect them, how to explain their content and how to intervene them prior to being posted - by applying a range of strategies built on top of generative AI…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Naquee Rizwan , Subhankar Swain , Paramananda Bhaskar , Gagan Aryan , Shehryaar Shah Khan , Animesh Mukherjee

Online memes are a powerful yet challenging medium for content moderation, often masking harmful intent behind humor, irony, or cultural symbolism. Conventional moderation systems "especially those relying on explicit text" frequently fail…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Sayantan Adak , Somnath Banerjee , Rajarshi Mandal , Avik Halder , Sayan Layek , Rima Hazra , Animesh Mukherjee

The prevalence of memes on social media has created the need to sentiment analyze their underlying meanings for censoring harmful content. Meme censoring systems by machine learning raise the need for a semi-supervised learning solution to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Pham Thai Hoang Tung , Nguyen Tan Viet , Ngo Tien Anh , Phan Duy Hung

Toxicity identification in online multimodal environments remains a challenging task due to the complexity of contextual connections across modalities (e.g., textual and visual). In this paper, we propose a novel framework that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Rahul Garg , Trilok Padhi , Hemang Jain , Ugur Kursuncu , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru

The exponential growth of social media has profoundly transformed how information is created, disseminated, and absorbed, exceeding any precedent in the digital age. Regrettably, this explosion has also spawned a significant increase in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Hongzhan Lin , Ziyang Luo , Bo Wang , Ruichao Yang , Jing Ma

Amidst the rise of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and their widespread application in generating and interpreting complex content, the risk of propagating biased and harmful memes remains significant. Current safety measures often fail to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Xuanyu Su , Yansong Li , Diana Inkpen , Nathalie Japkowicz

In the current context where online platforms have been effectively weaponized in a variety of geo-political events and social issues, Internet memes make fair content moderation at scale even more difficult. Existing work on meme…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-10 Abhinav Kumar Thakur , Filip Ilievski , Hông-Ân Sandlin , Zhivar Sourati , Luca Luceri , Riccardo Tommasini , Alain Mermoud

This work proposes a new challenge set for multimodal classification, focusing on detecting hate speech in multimodal memes. It is constructed such that unimodal models struggle and only multimodal models can succeed: difficult examples…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Douwe Kiela , Hamed Firooz , Aravind Mohan , Vedanuj Goswami , Amanpreet Singh , Pratik Ringshia , Davide Testuggine

Online hate remains a significant societal challenge, especially as multimodal content enables subtle, culturally grounded, and implicit forms of harm. Hateful memes embed hostility through text-image interactions and humor, making them…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Sahajpreet Singh , Kokil Jaidka , Subhayan Mukerjee

Memes on the Internet are often harmless and sometimes amusing. However, by using certain types of images, text, or combinations of both, the seemingly harmless meme becomes a multimodal type of hate speech -- a hateful meme. The Hateful…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Riza Velioglu , Jewgeni Rose

Hateful memes are an emerging method of spreading hate on the internet, relying on both images and text to convey a hateful message. We take an interpretable approach to hateful meme detection, using machine learning and simple heuristics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Tanvi Deshpande , Nitya Mani

Memes often merge visuals with brief text to share humor or opinions, yet some memes contain harmful messages such as hate speech. In this paper, we introduces MemeBLIP2, a light weight multimodal system that detects harmful memes by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Jiaqi Liu , Ran Tong , Aowei Shen , Shuzheng Li , Changlin Yang , Lisha Xu

Memes are a dominant medium for online communication and manipulation because meaning emerges from interactions between embedded text, imagery, and cultural context. Existing meme research is distributed across tasks (hate, misogyny,…

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are increasingly used for tasks where detecting multimodal harmful content is crucial, such as online content moderation. However, real-world harmful content is often camouflaged, relying on nuanced…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Yanhui Li , Qi Zhou , Zhihong Xu , Huizhong Guo , Wenhai Wang , Dongxia Wang

The proliferation of harmful memes on online media poses significant risks to public health and stability. Existing detection methods heavily rely on large-scale labeled data for training, which necessitates substantial manual annotation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Jian Lang , Rongpei Hong , Ting Zhong , Leiting Chen , Qiang Gao , Fan Zhou