Mapping Memes to Words for Multimodal Hateful Meme Classification

12 Oct 2023  ·  Giovanni Burbi, Alberto Baldrati, Lorenzo Agnolucci, Marco Bertini, Alberto del Bimbo ·

Multimodal image-text memes are prevalent on the internet, serving as a unique form of communication that combines visual and textual elements to convey humor, ideas, or emotions. However, some memes take a malicious turn, promoting hateful content and perpetuating discrimination. Detecting hateful memes within this multimodal context is a challenging task that requires understanding the intertwined meaning of text and images. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a novel approach named ISSUES for multimodal hateful meme classification. ISSUES leverages a pre-trained CLIP vision-language model and the textual inversion technique to effectively capture the multimodal semantic content of the memes. The experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the Hateful Memes Challenge and HarMeme datasets. The code and the pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/miccunifi/ISSUES.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Benchmark
Hateful Meme Classification HarMeme ISSUES AUROC 92.83 # 1
Accuracy 81.64 # 3
Meme Classification Hateful Memes ISSUES ROC-AUC 0.855 # 4

Methods