ArGuard is a shared task that evaluates harmful content detection in Arabic memes and LLM prompts, featuring two tracks: Track A for multimodal hate detection in memes and Track B for harmful prompt detection in Arabic LLM safety evaluation. Fifty‑eight teams registered, 35 reached the final evaluation, and 27 submitted system‑description papers, with participants experimenting with models such as AraBERT, Jais, and Qwen3‑VL. The top systems achieved macro‑F1 scores of 0.823 on A1, 0.419 on A2, 0.984 on B1, and 0.790 on B2, with fine‑grained meme classification in A2 proving the most challenging due to sparse labels and distribution shifts.
By Firoj Alam, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Hamdy Mubarak, George Mikros, Abul Hasnat, Wajdi Zaghouani
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:2606. 15307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hateful and propagandistic memes exploit the interplay between images and text to convey harmful intent that neither modality reveals alone.
By Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Mucahid Kutlu, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Abul Hasnat, Firoj Alam
ProBel is a bilingual Arabic and English resource for propaganda detection that aligns binary labels, multi-label annotations for 23 propaganda techniques grouped into six categories, technique-labeled spans, and reference explanations for news sentences. The dataset supports matched binary, coarse-grained, multi-label, and span-level tasks in both languages, and the authors evaluate zero‑shot prompting, task‑specific fine‑tuning, and joint training. A single bilingual multi‑task model achieves the best overall performance, with cross‑task analysis revealing that joint classification preserves binary performance while span‑only training can weaken sentence‑level prediction, and that joint bilingual training yields the most stable results.
By Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Elisa Sartori, Giovanni Da San Martino, Firoj Alam
arXiv:2609.16393v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce ParsHate, a manually annotated dataset of 10,000 Persian tweets spanning 2013-2022, representing the first decade-long benchmark for hate...
By Zahra Bokaei, Walid Magdy, Bonnie Webber
arXiv:2607. 13425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning effectively from limited data is critical in domains like security where labeled examples are scarce.
By Tuomas Oikarinen, Zixiao Chen, Charlotte Siska, Tsui-Wei Weng, Chandan Singh, Jianfeng Gao
The paper introduces CLASP‑Ar, a cloze‑style prompting method for Arabic stance detection that replaces complex multitask learning and ensembles with a single masked language modeling prompt. By combining the target, predicted sentiment, and text into one prompt and constraining the [MASK] prediction to a verbalizer‑defined label set, the approach aims to simplify the task while maintaining performance.
By Bhuvanesh Verma, Ali Abusaleh, Alexander Mehler
MemeTAG introduces a dual‑objective framework for classifying harmful memes by combining keyword generation from a pretrained Vision‑Language Model with an Aggregated Tag Inference Network (ATIN) that condenses these keywords into a rich semantic embedding. The embedding is used as a target for an auxiliary reconstruction loss, encouraging deep alignment between visual and textual features. This approach, along with a three‑stage training strategy, achieves new state‑of‑the‑art results on the HarMeme, Hateful Memes Challenge, and PrideMM datasets.
By Akshit Sharma, Prashant W. Patil
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:2606. 07604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Analyzing attention weights has become a standard approach for interpreting the information flow of Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Harry Jake Cunningham, Nicola Muca Cirone
arXiv:2609.26907v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Memes often derive their harmful, hateful, or sarcastic meaning from small but decisive visual, textual, or cross-modal cues. Existing multimodal cla...
By Akshit Sharma, Prashant W. Patil
We introduce ParsHate, a manually annotated dataset of 10,000 Persian tweets spanning 2013-2022, representing the first decade-long benchmark for hate speech detection in Persian. The dataset contains...