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.

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• reinforcement-learning
• multimodal
• safety