arXiv Computation and Language

Learning to Think Like a Cartoon Captionist: Incongruity-Resolution Supervision for Multimodal Humor Understanding

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 Machine Learning
Oct 28

From Perception to Punchline: Empowering VLM with the Art of In-the-wild Meme

The paper introduces HUMOR, a framework that enhances vision‑language models (VLMs) for generating humorous memes by guiding them through a hierarchical, multi‑path Chain‑of‑Thought reasoning process. HUMOR first identifies a template‑level intent, explores diverse reasoning paths under different contexts, and then anchors onto a high‑quality, context‑specific path, thereby increasing reasoning diversity. Additionally, a pairwise reward model trained on groups of memes sharing the same template captures subjective humor, enabling group‑wise reinforcement learning that guarantees monotonic improvement within a trust region. Experiments demonstrate that HUMOR improves reasoning diversity, preference alignment, and overall meme quality, and the authors suggest the approach generalizes to other open‑ended, human‑aligned multimodal generation tasks.

By Xueyan Li, Yingyi Xue, Mengjie Jiang, Qingzi Zhu, Yazhe Niu
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Mitigating Perceptual Judgment Bias in Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge via Perceptual Perturbation and Reward Modeling

arXiv:2606. 02578v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models have demonstrated strong reasoning ability, yet their reliability as automated evaluators remains limited by a critical weakness: when visual evidence conflicts with textual cues, MLLM judges tend to reward plausible narratives over perceptually correct answers.

By Seojeong Park, Jiho Choi, Junyong Kang, Seonho Lee, Jaeyo Shin, Hyunjung Shim
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

UReason: Benchmarking Reasoning-to-Generation Alignment in Unified Multimodal Models

UReason is a benchmark that evaluates how well unified multimodal models (UMMs) align textual reasoning with image generation. It contains 2,000 human‑curated instances across five reasoning‑intensive tasks—Code, Arithmetic, Spatial, Attribute, and Text—and compares direct generation, reasoning‑guided generation, and decontextualized generation. The study finds that while reasoning‑guided generation improves over direct generation, decontextualized generation consistently outperforms it, indicating that the visual semantics in textual reasoning are not reliably reflected in the generated images.

By Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Huijuan Wang, Ivan Yee Lee, Yong Liu, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

MagiC: Evaluating Multimodal Cognition Toward Grounded Visual Reasoning

MagiC is a benchmark for grounded multimodal cognition that evaluates vision‑language models on answer accuracy, step‑by‑step reasoning quality, grounding fidelity, and self‑correction. It contains about 5,500 weakly supervised QA examples generated from strong model outputs and 900 human‑curated examples with fine‑grained annotations, including rationales and bounding box groundings. The benchmark tests 15 models ranging from 7B to 70B parameters, introduces new metrics such as MagiScore and StepSense, and includes diagnostic settings to probe robustness against adversarial visual cues and introspective error correction.

By Chengfei Wu, Ronald Seoh, Bingxuan Li, Liqiang Zhang, Fengrong Han, Dan Goldwasser
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 5

DEPICT: Scoring Text-to-Image Alignment by Answer Agreement

DEPICT is a new training‑free metric for evaluating text‑to‑image alignment. It replaces fixed reference answers with an agreement rule that compares image‑based and caption‑only responses, weighting questions by how decisively the caption determines them. By merging this agreement score with a holistic score, DEPICT improves negation accuracy dramatically and outperforms existing training‑free metrics while matching or exceeding fine‑tuned evaluators on several benchmarks.

By Vasco Ramos, Sandra Godinho Silva, Joao Magalhaes, Ricardo Rei, Pedro Henrique Martins