Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models

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Main Authors: Lin, Hongzhan, Luo, Ziyang, Gao, Wei, Ma, Jing, Wang, Bo, Yang, Ruichao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Lin, Hongzhan
Luo, Ziyang
Gao, Wei
Ma, Jing
Wang, Bo
Yang, Ruichao
author_facet Lin, Hongzhan
Luo, Ziyang
Gao, Wei
Ma, Jing
Wang, Bo
Yang, Ruichao
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_13298
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models
Lin, Hongzhan
Luo, Ziyang
Gao, Wei
Ma, Jing
Wang, Bo
Yang, Ruichao
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
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.
title Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13298