Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

10-2023

Abstract

The age of social media is flooded with Internet memes, necessitating a clear grasp and effective identification of harmful ones. This task presents a significant challenge due to the implicit meaning embedded in memes, which is not explicitly conveyed through the surface text and image. However, existing harmful meme detection methods do not present readable explanations that unveil such implicit meaning to support their detection decisions. In this paper, we propose an explainable approach to detect harmful memes, achieved through reasoning over conflicting rationales from both harmless and harmful positions. Specifically, inspired by the powerful capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) on text generation and reasoning, we first elicit multimodal debate between LLMs to generate the explanations derived from the contradictory arguments. Then we propose to fine-tune a small language model as the debate judge for harmfulness inference, to facilitate multimodal fusion between the harmfulness rationales and the intrinsic multimodal information within memes. In this way, our model is empowered to perform dialectical reasoning over intricate and implicit harm-indicative patterns, utilizing multimodal explanations originating from both harmless and harmful arguments. Extensive experiments on three public meme datasets demonstrate that our harmful meme detection approach achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art methods and exhibits a superior capacity for explaining the meme harmfulness of the model predictions.

Keywords

harmful meme detection, explainability, multimodal debate, LLMs

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing | Social Media

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

WWW '24: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024

First Page

2359

Last Page

2370

ISBN

9798400701719

Identifier

10.1145/3589334.3645381

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3589334.3645381

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