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.
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.
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.
MexHat is a newly released video dataset aimed at improving hate‑speech detection in Mexican Spanish. It contains roughly 1,000 clips annotated for three broad categories—no negative content, offensive content, and hate‑speech—as well as a finer classification into three hate‑speech sub‑categories. The paper presents dataset statistics and baseline results, underscoring the challenges of detecting culturally and contextually nuanced hate speech in multimodal content.
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.
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.
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...
The paper introduces WSF-ARG+, a new dataset that pairs hate speech with check‑worthiness annotations, and presents an LLM‑in‑the‑loop framework to streamline the annotation process. Experiments with 12 open‑weight large language models demonstrate that the framework cuts human effort while maintaining annotation quality. The study also shows that incorporating check‑worthiness labels improves hate‑speech detection performance, boosting macro‑F1 scores for large models by up to 0.213 and averaging 0.154 across models.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.