arXiv:2606. 13256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humor plays a central role in human social relationships, and recent advances in computational humor create new opportunities for integrating humor into human-robot interaction (HRI).
By Anna-Maria Velentza, Anne-Gwenn Bosser
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.
By Yuxi Ma, Yongqian Peng, Junchen Lyu, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu
MultiHuSE is a multimodal dataset featuring 2,407 high‑definition videos of 50 diverse actors delivering 1,463 text samples in four psychological humour styles—affiliative, aggressive, self‑enhancing, and self‑deprecating—plus neutral content. Each text is performed by multiple actors, allowing analysis of expressive diversity, and a subset includes emotion annotations. Baseline experiments show that multimodal fusion improves humour style classification accuracy over unimodal approaches, especially for affiliative humour.
By Mary Ogbuka Kenneth, Foaad Khosmood, Abbas Edalat
The paper investigates automated reward systems for training language models in conversational humor, examining how reward exploits can undermine intended behavior. It evaluates two reward approaches—an embedding-based surprise reward and an audience-model laughter prediction—showing that each can be tricked by word shuffling or laughter cues, respectively. Countermeasures such as fluency filtering and cue normalization mitigate some attacks but also risk rejecting genuine witty responses, highlighting the difficulty of designing robust rewards.
By Sam Larson
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.
By Tuo Liang, Zhe Hu, Disheng Liu, Jing Li, Yu Yin
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.
By Fabio De Ponte