arXiv:2606. 00022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humor generation remains difficult not only because producing fluent, novel jokes is hard, but because "funny" is audience-dependent and supervision is noisy -- preferences vary with audience, context, and culture, and annotator agreement is often low.
arXiv:2607. 13189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present RAGthoven, our system for SemEval-2026 Task 1 (MWAHAHA), Subtask A (multilingual constrained humor generation in English, Spanish, and Chinese).
The paper introduces IRS (Incongruity-Resolution Supervision), a framework that breaks humor understanding into three parts: identifying mismatches in a visual scene, creating coherent reinterpretations of those mismatches, and aligning these interpretations with human preferences. IRS uses structured reasoning traces to guide models from visual perception to humorous interpretation, and it is evaluated on the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. Experiments on 7B, 32B, and 72B models show that IRS improves caption matching and ranking, with the 72B model achieving 76.10% ranking accuracy—outperforming non-expert humans and all other multimodal baselines—and demonstrates transferable reasoning patterns in zero‑shot settings.
arXiv:2601.03103v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humor preferences vary widely across individuals and cultures, complicating the evaluation of humor using large language models (LLMs). In th...
arXiv:2607. 19011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal humor in memes, cartoons, and comics remains difficult for AI systems because intended meaning depends on non-literal mechanisms, shared cultural knowledge, and communicative intent rather than literal scene description.
The paper investigates how semantic distance and ambiguity contribute to joke humor by revisiting and extending metrics from prior work. It introduces a new symmetry metric—measuring how close the ambiguous element Z is to both X and Y—and evaluates it using two embedding models on three joke datasets, including expanded versions with paired ambiguous sentences. Although models based on these metrics performed poorly in predicting humor ratings, the symmetry metric consistently correlated with higher-rated jokes, hinting it captures a key, though not sole, property of humor.
arXiv:2608.23172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable versatility across a wide range of multimodal tasks. However, understanding humo...
arXiv:2608. 13069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly aligned to function as passive, sycophantic assistants.
arXiv:2507. 06506v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Translating wordplay across languages presents unique challenges that have long confounded both professional human translators and machine translation systems.
Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly aligned to function as passive, sycophantic assistants. We challenge this default paradigm by empirically evaluating the cognitive plasticity of open-weight architectures when subjected to rigorous behavioral reprogramming.
arXiv:2510. 01171v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-training alignment often reduces LLM diversity, leading to a phenomenon known as mode collapse.
The paper introduces the Dual Prediction Violation (DPV) framework to study how timing and semantic surprise interact in humor. Analyzing 828 Chinese stand‑up performances, it finds that temporal features—especially pauses before high‑surprise punchlines—are more predictive of audience appreciation than overall semantic incongruity. The study reframes humor as a temporally scaffolded phenomenon where timing and content coordinate strategically rather than independently.