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: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: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...
By Akshit Sharma, Prashant W. Patil
arXiv:2607. 23493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated analysis of multimodal content on social networks has become a critical task for understanding public sentiment and information diffusion in the digital age.
By Musa Tur Farazi, Nufayer Jahan Reza
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.
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