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:2602. 07026v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the success of multimodal contrastive learning in aligning visual and linguistic representations, a persistent geometric anomaly, the Modality Gap, remains: embeddings of distinct modalities expressing identical semantics occupy systematically offset regions.
By Xiaomin Yu, Yi Xin, Yuhui Zhang, Wenjie Zhang, Chonghan Liu, Hanzhen Zhao, Chen Liu, Xiaoxing Hu, Ziyue Qiao, Hao Tang, Xiaobin Hu, Chengwei Qin, Hui Xiong, Yu Qiao, Shuicheng Yan
arXiv:2607. 03981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Memes have become influential communication tools on social media, combining viral visuals with concise messaging to convey impactful ideas.
By Fatema Tuj Johora Faria, Mukaffi Bin Moin, Md. Mahfuzur Rahman, Pronay Debnath, Asif Iftekher Fahim, Faisal Muhammad Shah
arXiv:2607. 23493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated analysis of multimodal content on social networks has become a critical task for understanding public sentiment and information diffusion in the digital age.
By Musa Tur Farazi, Nufayer Jahan Reza
arXiv:2606. 07706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across multimodal tasks, yet their safety robustness remains an open challenge.
By Rishabh Makwana, Mamta, Deeksha Varshney, Oana Cocarascu
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
arXiv:2512.20257v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: With the rise of easily accessible generative tools for creating and manipulating multimedia content, the threat of realistic synthetic alterations...
By Daniele Cardullo, Simone Teglia, Irene Amerini
arXiv:2606. 31876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To improve safety in Large Language Models (LLMs) we can either perform post-training alignment or exploit refusal directions in the activation space.
By Moreno D'Inc\`a, Massimiliano Mancini, Nicu Sebe
arXiv:2608.22832v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The social interactions among crowds via \textit{Danmaku} (a.k.a., bullet comments) on modern multimedia platforms can facilitate both viewpoint confli...
By Xiansheng Luo, Chaowei Zhang, Zewei Zhang, Yi Zhu, Jipeng Qiang
The paper introduces CMPM, a Chinese Multi-Panel Meme benchmark comprising 1,214 annotated samples that capture five structural types, ordering dependencies, panel-order constraints, and optional comment context. It defines a two-layer evaluation: Task 1 tests structure typing and order-sensitive panel sequencing, while Task 2 assesses Chinese meme explanation generation using human ratings across visual, panel, humor, context, and faithfulness dimensions. Benchmarking five large vision‑language models shows that accuracy on canonical displays does not guarantee order understanding, as performance drops sharply under shuffled conditions, and that Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT‑5.5 outperform open models in Task 2, with comment context providing only modest gains.
By Haihan Li, Haihao Li, Zhenfei Xu, Jize Qian
arXiv:2606. 24112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal misinformation detection is increasingly important because viral posts now combine long multilingual narratives, several images, mixed provenance, and subtle text--image framing errors.
By Chenhao Dang, Dantong Zhu, Jun Yang, Conghui He, Weijia Li
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