The paper introduces ProKDA, a progressive knowledge-to-decision alignment framework for explainable hateful meme detection. ProKDA separates explanation generation and label prediction into three sequential training stages—background knowledge learning, hatefulness detection learning, and hatefulness boundary alignment—reducing task interference. Experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate that ProKDA achieves state‑of‑the‑art detection performance while providing accurate, evidence‑supported explanations for moderation decisions.
By Bo Xu, Chenyuan Wang, Xinyu Chen, Quanhao Zhu, Rui Lin, Liang Zhao, Hongfei Lin, Feng Xia
Hateful memes are a growing form of multimodal online harm, where hostile intent is often conveyed through the joint interpretation of images, text, cultural references, and implicit targets. While hateful meme detection has advanced in high-resource languages, Arabic remains underexplored, with existing meme resources focusing mainly on propaganda or coarse harmful-content labels.
arXiv:2605.31349v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Hateful meme detection remains a formidable challenge for vision-language models, as existing benchmarks are structurally observational - con...
By Paramananda Bhaskar, Naquee Rizwan, Daksh Jogchand, Saurabh Kumar Pandey, Animesh Mukherjee
arXiv:2609.22094v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Content moderation systems traditionally entangle multimodal understanding with policy-specific classification, requiring full pipeline retraining fo...
By Zeeshan Ahmed, Yang Qin, Hanqing Huang
arXiv:2608. 14629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) become the mainstay for information retrieval and summarization tasks, ensuring that they are always non-partisan and invulnerable to political bias is a critical step towards safer and more trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI).
By Tejaswi V. Panchagnula, Bruce Coburn, Bryce J. Dietrich, Robert X. Browning, Edward J. Delp, Fengqing Zhu
arXiv:2607. 15442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Internet memes intertwine visual cues, textual content, and cultural context, making them particularly challenging to interpret in scenarios where humor, sarcasm, and harmful intent coexist.
By Shanhong Liu, Pai Chet Ng, De Wen Soh, Malika Meghjani, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis
arXiv:2601. 11178v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Social media platforms are increasingly dominated by long-form multimodal content, where harmful narratives are constructed through a complex interplay of audio, visual, and textual cues.
By Girish A. Koushik, Helen Treharne, Diptesh Kanojia
MemeLens is a unified multilingual, multitask Vision‑Language Model designed to improve meme understanding across a wide range of tasks such as hate, misogyny, propaganda, sentiment, and humour. The authors consolidated 38 public meme datasets, mapping their labels into a shared taxonomy of 20 tasks covering harm, targets, figurative intent, and affect, and conducted extensive experiments to show that multimodal training and a unified approach outperform fine‑tuning on individual datasets. All experimental resources, the model, and the datasets are released publicly for community use.
By Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Abul Hasnat, Dimitar Dimitrov, Giovanni Da San Martino, Preslav Nakov, Firoj Alam
The paper proposes a training‑time explainability framework that aligns model reasoning with human‑annotated rationales to improve both classification performance and interpretability for multilingual hate speech detection. It is evaluated on HateXplain (English) and BullySent (Hinglish), datasets that capture anti‑Muslim hate in culturally coded, multilingual forms. Using methods such as LIME, Integrated Gradients, Grad‑X‑Input, and attention, the study shows that gradient‑ and attention‑based regularization boosts F‑scores, enhances plausibility and faithfulness, and captures culturally specific cues for detecting implicit anti‑Muslim hate.
By Muhammad Deedahwar Mazhar Qureshi, Sannaan Khan, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Wael Rashwan
The paper introduces MemeMind, a large-scale dataset for detecting harmful memes that includes a detailed taxonomy and Chain-of-Thought reasoning annotations. It also proposes MemeGuard, a multimodal framework that uses a three-stage training strategy to improve visual understanding, reasoning, and discrimination of harmful content. Experiments show MemeGuard surpasses current state-of-the-art methods on MemeMind, advancing detection accuracy and interpretability.
By Hexiang Gu, Qifan Yu, Yuan Liu, Zikang Li, Saihui Hou, Jian Zhao, Zhaofeng He
arXiv:2608. 16622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal harmful meme detection is typically formulated as image--text harmfulness classification.
By Yujia Li, Yiqun Zhang, Zihan Cheng, Yijie Huang, Tenglong Ye, Zihan Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Daling Wang
The paper introduces WSF-ARG+, a new dataset that pairs hate speech with check‑worthiness annotations, and presents an LLM‑in‑the‑loop framework to streamline the annotation process. Experiments with 12 open‑weight large language models demonstrate that the framework cuts human effort while maintaining annotation quality. The study also shows that incorporating check‑worthiness labels improves hate‑speech detection performance, boosting macro‑F1 scores for large models by up to 0.213 and averaging 0.154 across models.
By Nicol\'as Benjam\'in Ocampo, Tommaso Caselli, Davide Ceolin