MUStReason: A Benchmark for Diagnosing Pragmatic Reasoning in Video-LMs for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Saha, Anisha, Suresh, Varsha, Hospedales, Timothy, Demberg, Vera
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Saha, Anisha
Suresh, Varsha
Hospedales, Timothy
Demberg, Vera
author_facet Saha, Anisha
Suresh, Varsha
Hospedales, Timothy
Demberg, Vera
contents Sarcasm is a specific type of irony which involves discerning what is said from what is meant. Detecting sarcasm depends not only on the literal content of an utterance but also on non-verbal cues such as speaker's tonality, facial expressions and conversational context. However, current multimodal models struggle with complex tasks like sarcasm detection, which require identifying relevant cues across modalities and pragmatically reasoning over them to infer the speaker's intention. To explore these limitations in VideoLMs, we introduce MUStReason, a diagnostic benchmark enriched with annotations of modality-specific relevant cues and underlying reasoning steps to identify sarcastic intent. In addition to benchmarking sarcasm classification performance in VideoLMs, using MUStReason we quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the generated reasoning by disentangling the problem into perception and reasoning, we propose PragCoT, a framework that steers VideoLMs to focus on implied intentions over literal meaning, a property core to detecting sarcasm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_23727
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MUStReason: A Benchmark for Diagnosing Pragmatic Reasoning in Video-LMs for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection
Saha, Anisha
Suresh, Varsha
Hospedales, Timothy
Demberg, Vera
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Sarcasm is a specific type of irony which involves discerning what is said from what is meant. Detecting sarcasm depends not only on the literal content of an utterance but also on non-verbal cues such as speaker's tonality, facial expressions and conversational context. However, current multimodal models struggle with complex tasks like sarcasm detection, which require identifying relevant cues across modalities and pragmatically reasoning over them to infer the speaker's intention. To explore these limitations in VideoLMs, we introduce MUStReason, a diagnostic benchmark enriched with annotations of modality-specific relevant cues and underlying reasoning steps to identify sarcastic intent. In addition to benchmarking sarcasm classification performance in VideoLMs, using MUStReason we quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the generated reasoning by disentangling the problem into perception and reasoning, we propose PragCoT, a framework that steers VideoLMs to focus on implied intentions over literal meaning, a property core to detecting sarcasm.
title MUStReason: A Benchmark for Diagnosing Pragmatic Reasoning in Video-LMs for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23727