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
arXiv:2606. 15307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hateful and propagandistic memes exploit the interplay between images and text to convey harmful intent that neither modality reveals alone.
By Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Mucahid Kutlu, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Abul Hasnat, Firoj Alam
arXiv:2601. 11178v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Social media platforms are increasingly dominated by long-form multimodal content, where harmful narratives are constructed through a complex interplay of audio, visual, and textual cues.
By Girish A. Koushik, Helen Treharne, Diptesh Kanojia
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:2608. 16622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal harmful meme detection is typically formulated as image--text harmfulness classification.
By Yujia Li, Yiqun Zhang, Zihan Cheng, Yijie Huang, Tenglong Ye, Zihan Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Daling Wang
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.
arXiv:2605.31349v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Hateful meme detection remains a formidable challenge for vision-language models, as existing benchmarks are structurally observational - con...
By Paramananda Bhaskar, Naquee Rizwan, Daksh Jogchand, Saurabh Kumar Pandey, Animesh Mukherjee
The paper introduces FAID, a fine‑grained adaptive framework for detecting implicit hate speech. It first classifies samples into Shallow, Targeted, or Context‑Dependent categories and then applies tailored strategies—prompt‑tuning for shallow cases, knowledge augmentation for targeted ones, and an agentic prompt‑generation system for context‑dependent posts. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that FAID outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines by allocating computational effort only where needed.
By Han Wang, Yuhu Cheng, Xuesong Wang, Yi Zhu
The paper proposes a training‑time explainability framework that aligns model reasoning with human‑annotated rationales to improve both classification performance and interpretability for multilingual hate speech detection. It is evaluated on HateXplain (English) and BullySent (Hinglish), datasets that capture anti‑Muslim hate in culturally coded, multilingual forms. Using methods such as LIME, Integrated Gradients, Grad‑X‑Input, and attention, the study shows that gradient‑ and attention‑based regularization boosts F‑scores, enhances plausibility and faithfulness, and captures culturally specific cues for detecting implicit anti‑Muslim hate.
By Muhammad Deedahwar Mazhar Qureshi, Sannaan Khan, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Wael Rashwan
The paper examines how four leading vision‑language models—LLaVA‑7B, Qwen‑VL, GPT‑4o mini, and Claude 3 Haiku—perform in detecting hateful content within memes. It evaluates the models under zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting, focusing not only on classification accuracy but also on the qualitative justifications they generate. The study highlights that these models often overlook contextual nuances, irony, and subtle cues essential for accurately identifying hate speech in memes.
By Muhammad Jawad Chowdhury, Adiba Hasan, Ishrak Hossain, Shahriar Ivan, Sabbir Ahmed
arXiv:2608.23152v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Counterspeech effectively neutralizes the impact of online hate. Although prior work explores automated counterspeech generation, it largely emphasizes...
By Sujoy Nath, Aswini Kumar, Tanmoy Chakraborty
The paper explores using a large language model (LLM) to generate background context for social media posts and tests four ways to integrate this context into a Sentence-BERT (SBERT) hate‑speech detection classifier. The methods include text concatenation, embedding concatenation, hierarchical transformer fusion, and LLM‑driven text enhancement. Experiments on the Latent Hatred dataset of implicitly hateful tweets and the MAMI dataset of misogynous memes show that adding generated context can raise F1 scores by up to 3 points in textual and 6 points in multimodal settings compared to a zero‑context baseline, with embedding concatenation yielding the best results.
By Joshua Wolfe Brook, Ilia Markov