TransMeme introduces a multi‑agent framework for cross‑cultural meme transcreation, addressing the unique challenges of preserving intent, adapting cultural meaning, and maintaining multimodal consistency. The system coordinates specialized agents for cultural adaptation, text rewriting, revision, and visual adjustment, and is evaluated on Chinese‑English meme pairs. Human and LLM‑based evaluations show that TransMeme outperforms baselines, achieving a 33.1% average improvement in human scores and a 60% Top‑1 ranking rate in LLM judgments.
By Jingyi Zheng, Yule Liu, Zifan Peng, Tianyi Hu, Yuemeng Zhao, Xinhu Zheng, Xinlei He
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.
By Russell Taylor, Benjamin Herbert, Michael Sana
arXiv:2605. 16716v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text-to-video (T2V) generation has rapidly progressed in visual fidelity, yet its ability to faithfully represent multiple cultures within a single prompt remains underexplored.
By Shuowei Li, Yuming Zhao, Parth Bhalerao, Oana Ignat
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.
By Tuo Liang, Zhe Hu, Disheng Liu, Jing Li, Yu Yin
arXiv:2605. 16716v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text-to-video (T2V) generation has rapidly progressed in visual fidelity, yet its ability to faithfully represent multiple cultures within a single prompt remains underexplored.
By Shuowei Li, Yuming Zhao, Parth Bhalerao, Oana Ignat
Translating wordplay across languages has long challenged both professional translators and machine translation systems. We investigate three approaches to translating puns from English to French by combining large language models with linguistic constraints for wordplay generation.
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
MemeCULT-1K is a multilingual benchmark of 1,000 South Asian memes in Bengali, English, and Hindi, each paired with a cultural context note and three human-written explanations, plus an additional set of 54 Bengali regional dialect memes. The study evaluates thirteen vision‑language models under meme‑only and context‑aware settings, showing that providing minimal cultural context consistently improves performance across all models and languages. Error analysis indicates closed‑source models struggle with entity and reference misidentification, while open‑source models are limited by broader cultural knowledge gaps, especially in linguistic and phonological aspects.
By Tawsif Tashwar Dipto, Mehedi Ahamed, Radib Bin Kabir, Mueeze Al Mushabbir, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Mir Rayat Imtiaz Hossain, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Sabbir Ahmed
arXiv:2508. 05502v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform strongly in high-resource languages, yet often produce fluent but culturally "thin" descriptions in low-resource settings.
By Yufei Gao, Jiaying Fei, Nuo Chen, Ruirui Chen, Guohang Yan, Yunshi Lan, Botian Shi
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.
By Alexey Tikhonov, Alexey Ivanov
arXiv:2609.00491v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Communicating across cultures is inherently challenging, especially through culturally dense and ambiguous formats like memes. While people expect larg...
By Hangxiao Zhu, Suliu Qin, Zhuoyan Li, Ming Jiang, Yu Zhang, Meng Xia
The paper introduces a three‑layer checklist-and-judge framework to evaluate interpreter agents that mediate live conversation across languages. It assesses semantic, pragmatic, and cultural‑social dimensions—naturalness, intent, and social appropriateness—rather than just fidelity, in both single‑turn and multi‑turn settings. Extensive validation shows that conventional MT metrics miss failures in stronger interpreters, and that context, structured instructions, and cultural cues influence communicative success.
By Faiz Ghifari Haznitrama, Alice Oh