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
SafeAtlas-VL introduces a large multimodal safety dataset with 1.5 million instances, rating image, request, and response risks on a five‑level ordinal scale across 15 harm categories and 55 subcategories. The accompanying SafeAtlas‑Bench provides 5,000 held‑out cases for evaluating ordinal predictions and continuous risk scores. Models trained on this data, including an 8B Guard model, achieve state‑of‑the‑art performance, outperforming prior benchmarks by about 4% in F1 score.
By Zongrui Wang, Xiangyang Zhu, Sicheng Wang, Han Wang, Dingyi Rong, Zeyu Zhang, Chunyi Li, Yue Shi, Kaiwei Zhang, Zicheng Zhang, Yuan Tian, Qi Jia, Yan Teng, Wei Sun, Ning Liu, Guangtao Zhai
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
arXiv:2503. 11832v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent vision language models (VLMs) have made remarkable strides in generative modeling with multimodal inputs, particularly text and images.
By Yiwei Chen, Yuguang Yao, Yihua Zhang, Bingquan Shen, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu
arXiv:2609.39688v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal encoders such as CLIP underlie many downstream systems, but their web-scale training data embed harmful associations that safety alignment...
By Tobia Poppi, Silvia Cappelletti, Samuele Poppi, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Diego Garcia-Olano, Rita Cucchiara
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.
Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved high visual fidelity and broad adoption, but remain vulnerable to safety violations when adversaries exploit them to synthesize illicit content. Existing alignment paradigms, from input sanitization to structural feature pruning, are largely organized around unsafe concepts explicitly exposed during filtering, editing, or localization.
arXiv:2604. 00310v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large-language models (MLLMs) often experience degraded safety alignment when harmful queries exploit cross-modal interactions.
By Anurag Kumar, Raghuveer Peri, Jon Burnsky, Alexandru Nelus, Rohit Paturi, Srikanth Vishnubhotla, Yanjun Qi
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:2606. 15396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns.
By Wenbo Yu, Bohua Wang, Hao Fang, Kuofeng Gao, Jingru Zeng, Xiaochen Yang, Tianyi Zhang, Xiaoxiao Ma, Jiawei Kong, Hao Wu, Bin Chen, Shu-Tao Xia, Min Zhang
arXiv:2609.13794v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Detecting harmful memes is critical for maintaining safe online communities. However, harmful intent is often implicit, arising from visual-textual inc...
By Hanling Wang, Chenlong Wei, Yingjuan Li, Di Wu, Yuchao Zhang, Xiaohui Zhu, Yao Zhu
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