Hateful meme detection is a challenging multimodal task that requires comprehension of both vision and language, as well as cross-modal interactions. Recent studies have tried to fine-tune pre-trained vision-language models (PVLMs) for this task. However, with increasing model sizes, it becomes important to leverage powerful PVLMs more efficiently, rather than simply fine-tuning them. Recently, researchers have attempted to convert meme images into textual captions and prompt language models for predictions. This approach has shown good performance but suffers from non-informative image captions. Considering the two factors mentioned above, we propose a probing-based captioning approach to leverage PVLMs in a zero-shot visual question answering (VQA) manner. Specifically, we prompt a frozen PVLM by asking hateful content-related questions and use the answers as image captions (which we call Pro-Cap), so that the captions contain information critical for hateful content detection. The good performance of models with Pro-Cap on three benchmarks validates the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method.
The recently introduced hateful meme challenge demonstrates the difficulty of determining whether a meme is hateful or not. Specifically, both unimodal language models and multimodal vision-language models cannot reach the human level of performance. Motivated by the need to model the contrast between the image content and the overlayed text, we suggest applying an off-the-shelf image captioning tool in order to capture the first. We demonstrate that the incorporation of such automatic captions during fine-tuning improves the results for various unimodal and multimodal models. Moreover, in the…
Detecting and Understanding Hateful Contents in Memes Through Captioning and Visual Question-Answering
The University of Sydney, School of Computer Science（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；University of Technology Sydney, School of Computer Science（新南威尔士大学技术学院）；University of Technology Sydney, TD School（新南威尔士大学TD学院）；Australian Catholic University, Peter Faber Business School（澳大利亚天主教大学彼得·法伯商学院）
In the past few years, there has been a surge of interest in multi-modal problems, from image captioning to visual question answering and beyond. In this paper, we focus on hate speech detection in multi-modal memes wherein memes pose an interesting multi-modal fusion problem. We aim to solve the Facebook Meme Challenge \cite{kiela2020hateful} which aims to solve a binary classification problem of predicting whether a meme is hateful or not. A crucial characteristic of the challenge is that it includes "benign confounders" to counter the possibility of models exploiting unimodal priors. The ch…
Memes are used for spreading ideas through social networks. Although most memes are created for humor, some memes become hateful under the combination of pictures and text. Automatically detecting the hateful memes can help reduce their harmful social impact. Unlike the conventional multimodal tasks, where the visual and textual information is semantically aligned, the challenge of hateful memes detection lies in its unique multimodal information. The image and text in memes are weakly aligned or even irrelevant, which requires the model to understand the content and perform reasoning over mul…
Oxford Internet Institute（牛津互联网研究院）；Dept. of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics（牛津上广实践伦理中心）；Dept. of Engineering Science（工程科学系）
Hateful memes pose a unique challenge for current machine learning systems because their message is derived from both text- and visual-modalities. To this effect, Facebook released the Hateful Memes Challenge, a dataset of memes with pre-extracted text captions, but it is unclear whether these synthetic examples generalize to `memes in the wild'. In this paper, we collect hateful and non-hateful memes from Pinterest to evaluate out-of-sample performance on models pre-trained on the Facebook dataset. We find that memes in the wild differ in two key aspects: 1) Captions must be extracted via OCR…
Hateful meme detection is a new research area recently brought out that requires both visual, linguistic understanding of the meme and some background knowledge to performing well on the task. This technical report summarises the first place solution of the Hateful Meme Detection Challenge 2020, which extending state-of-the-art visual-linguistic transformers to tackle this problem. At the end of the report, we also point out the shortcomings and possible directions for improving the current methodology.
Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）
Memes on the Internet are often harmless and sometimes amusing. However, by using certain types of images, text, or combinations of both, the seemingly harmless meme becomes a multimodal type of hate speech -- a hateful meme. The Hateful Memes Challenge is a first-of-its-kind competition which focuses on detecting hate speech in multimodal memes and it proposes a new data set containing 10,000+ new examples of multimodal content. We utilize VisualBERT -- which meant to be the BERT of vision and language -- that was trained multimodally on images and captions and apply Ensemble Learning. Our ap…
Hateful Meme Challenge proposed by Facebook AI has attracted contestants around the world. The challenge focuses on detecting hateful speech in multimodal memes. Various state-of-the-art deep learning models have been applied to this problem and the performance on challenge's leaderboard has also been constantly improved. In this paper, we enhance the hateful detection framework, including utilizing Detectron for feature extraction, exploring different setups of VisualBERT and UNITER models with different loss functions, researching the association between the hateful memes and the sensitive t…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Hateful meme detection is a new multimodal task that has gained significant traction in academic and industry research communities. Recently, researchers have applied pre-trained visual-linguistic models to perform the multimodal classification task, and some of these solutions have yielded promising results. However, what these visual-linguistic models learn for the hateful meme classification task remains unclear. For instance, it is unclear if these models are able to capture the derogatory or slurs references in multimodality (i.e., image and text) of the hateful memes. To fill this resear…
State-of-the-art image and text classification models, such as Convolutional Neural Networks and Transformers, have long been able to classify their respective unimodal reasoning satisfactorily with accuracy close to or exceeding human accuracy. However, images embedded with text, such as hateful memes, are hard to classify using unimodal reasoning when difficult examples, such as benign confounders, are incorporated into the data set. We attempt to generate more labeled memes in addition to the Hateful Memes data set from Facebook AI, based on the framework of a winning team from the Hateful …
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
Hateful memes are widespread in social media and convey negative information. The main challenge of hateful memes detection is that the expressive meaning can not be well recognized by a single modality. In order to further integrate modal information, we investigate a candidate solution based on complementary visual and linguistic network in Hateful Memes Challenge 2020. In this way, more comprehensive information of the multi-modality could be explored in detail. Both contextual-level and sensitive object-level information are considered in visual and linguistic embedding to formulate the co…
This work presents Vilio, an implementation of state-of-the-art visio-linguistic models and their application to the Hateful Memes Dataset. The implemented models have been fitted into a uniform code-base and altered to yield better performance. The goal of Vilio is to provide a user-friendly starting point for any visio-linguistic problem. An ensemble of 5 different V+L models implemented in Vilio achieves 2nd place in the Hateful Memes Challenge out of 3,300 participants. The code is available at https://github.com/Muennighoff/vilio.
Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Hateful memes are a growing menace on social media. While the image and its corresponding text in a meme are related, they do not necessarily convey the same meaning when viewed individually. Hence, detecting hateful memes requires careful consideration of both visual and textual information. Multimodal pre-training can be beneficial for this task because it effectively captures the relationship between the image and the text by representing them in a similar feature space. Furthermore, it is essential to model the interactions between the image and text features through intermediate fusion. M…
Internet memes have become a dominant method of communication; at the same time, however, they are also increasingly being used to advocate extremism and foster derogatory beliefs. Nonetheless, we do not have a firm understanding as to which perceptual aspects of memes cause this phenomenon. In this work, we assess the efficacy of current state-of-the-art multimodal machine learning models toward hateful meme detection, and in particular with respect to their generalizability across platforms. We use two benchmark datasets comprising 12,140 and 10,567 images from 4chan's "Politically Incorrect…
This work proposes a new challenge set for multimodal classification, focusing on detecting hate speech in multimodal memes. It is constructed such that unimodal models struggle and only multimodal models can succeed: difficult examples ("benign confounders") are added to the dataset to make it hard to rely on unimodal signals. The task requires subtle reasoning, yet is straightforward to evaluate as a binary classification problem. We provide baseline performance numbers for unimodal models, as well as for multimodal models with various degrees of sophistication. We find that state-of-the-art…
While significant progress has been made using machine learning algorithms to detect hate speech, important technical challenges still remain to be solved in order to bring their performance closer to human accuracy. We investigate several of the most recent visual-linguistic Transformer architectures and propose improvements to increase their performance for this task. The proposed model outperforms the baselines by a large margin and ranks 5$^{th}$ on the leaderboard out of 3,100+ participants.
CLARA: Clip-Level Multimodal Alignment with VLM-Derived Rationales for Hateful Video Detection
Institute for Analytics and Data Science, University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学分析与数据科学研究所）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽皇后学院）
Training-Free and Interpretable Hateful Video Detection via Multi-stage Adversarial Reasoning
Multimodal Intelligence Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, United Kingdom（埃克塞特大学计算机科学系多模态智能实验室）；Institute for Analytics and Data Science, University of Essex, United Kingdom（埃塞克斯大学分析与数据科学研究所）
All Changes May Have Invariant Principles: Improving Ever-Shifting Harmful Meme Detection via Design Concept Reproduction
State Key Laboratory of Complex System Modeling and Simulation Technology（复杂系统建模与仿真技术国家重点实验室）；Science and Technology on Integrated Information System Laboratory Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences（软件研究所信息集成系统技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology（TIB——莱布尼茨科学技术信息中心）；Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；L3S Research Center（L3S研究中心）
The detection of offensive, hateful content on social media is a challenging problem that affects many online users on a daily basis. Hateful content is often used to target a group of people based on ethnicity, gender, religion and other factors. The hate or contempt toward women has been increasing on social platforms. Misogynous content detection is especially challenging when textual and visual modalities are combined to form a single context, e.g., an overlay text embedded on top of an image, also known as meme. In this paper, we present a multimodal architecture that combines textual and…
University of Vienna（维也纳大学）；UniVie Doctoral School Computer Science（维也纳大学计算机科学博士学院）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）
Rainbow Noise: Stress-Testing Multimodal Harmful-Meme Detectors on LGBTQ Content
Mathematics and Statistics Department University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校数学与统计学系）；Computer Science Department University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校计算机科学系）；Naveen Jindal School of Management University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校奈文·金达尔管理学院）
Image memes and specifically their widely-known variation image macros, is a special new media type that combines text with images and is used in social media to playfully or subtly express humour, irony, sarcasm and even hate. It is important to accurately retrieve image memes from social media to better capture the cultural and social aspects of online phenomena and detect potential issues (hate-speech, disinformation). Essentially, the background image of an image macro is a regular image easily recognized as such by humans but cumbersome for the machine to do so due to feature map similari…
Political activity on social media presents a data-rich window into political behavior, but the vast amount of data means that almost all content analyses of social media require a data labeling step. However, most automated machine classification methods ignore the multimodality of posted content, focusing either on text or images. State-of-the-art vision-and-language models are unusable for most political science research: they require all observations to have both image and text and require computationally expensive pretraining. This paper proposes a novel vision-and-language framework call…
Meme is an interesting word. Internet memes offer unique insights into the changes in our perception of the world, the media and our own lives. If you surf the Internet for long enough, you will see it somewhere on the Internet. With the rise of social media platforms and convenient image dissemination, Image Meme has gained fame. Image memes have become a kind of pop culture and they play an important role in communication over social media, blogs, and open messages. With the development of artificial intelligence and the widespread use of deep learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and …
