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.
arXiv:2509. 10847v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI) companions become capable of human-like communication, including telling jokes, understanding how people cognitively and affectively respond to AI-attributed humor becomes increasingly important.
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).
arXiv:2604.09629v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humor generation poses a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), because their standard training objective (next-token prediction)...
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: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.
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...
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.
The study investigates structured disagreement among annotators in temporal laughter localization, revealing that disagreements are not random but exhibit systematic patterns—larger at offsets than onsets, more frequent for chuckles than full laughs, and predictable from event attributes. Re-annotating the SMILE-Temporal benchmark with multiple annotators per video shows that evaluating against a single reference annotation can significantly bias system scores and ranking accuracy. The authors propose a disagreement‑calibrated evaluation using conformally calibrated tolerance bands that better reflect the full annotator distribution.
arXiv:2606. 00046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video platforms such as YouTube have reshaped how users engage with entertainment and information, emphasizing brief, highly engaging content such as Shorts.
arXiv:2509. 25773v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI models capable of comprehending humor hold real-world promise -- for example, enhancing engagement in human-machine interactions.
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.
arXiv:2606. 11371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spoken language, whether produced by humans or large language models (LLM), unfolds over time with varying semantic content.