MER-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Meme Reappraisal

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Nie, Yiqi, Wang, Fei, Chen, Junjie, Li, Kun, Cai, Yudi, Guo, Dan, Li, Chenglong, Wang, Meng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866914396292251648
author Nie, Yiqi
Wang, Fei
Chen, Junjie
Li, Kun
Cai, Yudi
Guo, Dan
Li, Chenglong
Wang, Meng
author_facet Nie, Yiqi
Wang, Fei
Chen, Junjie
Li, Kun
Cai, Yudi
Guo, Dan
Li, Chenglong
Wang, Meng
contents Memes represent a tightly coupled, multimodal form of social expression, in which visual context and overlaid text jointly convey nuanced affect and commentary. Inspired by cognitive reappraisal in psychology, we introduce Meme Reappraisal, a novel multimodal generation task that aims to transform negatively framed memes into constructive ones while preserving their underlying scenario, entities, and structural layout. Unlike prior works on meme understanding or generation, Meme Reappraisal requires emotion-controllable, structure-preserving multimodal transformation under multiple semantic and stylistic constraints. To support this task, we construct MER-Bench, a benchmark of real-world memes with fine-grained multimodal annotations, including source and target emotions, positively rewritten meme text, visual editing specifications, and taxonomy labels covering visual type, sentiment polarity, and layout structure. We further propose a structured evaluation framework based on a multimodal large language model (MLLM)-as-a-Judge paradigm, decomposing performance into modality-level generation quality, affect controllability, structural fidelity, and global affective alignment. Extensive experiments across representative image-editing and multimodal-generation systems reveal substantial gaps in satisfying the constraints of structural preservation, semantic consistency, and affective transformation. We believe MER-Bench establishes a foundation for research on controllable meme editing and emotion-aware multimodal generation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/one-seven17/MER-Bench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15020
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MER-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Meme Reappraisal
Nie, Yiqi
Wang, Fei
Chen, Junjie
Li, Kun
Cai, Yudi
Guo, Dan
Li, Chenglong
Wang, Meng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Memes represent a tightly coupled, multimodal form of social expression, in which visual context and overlaid text jointly convey nuanced affect and commentary. Inspired by cognitive reappraisal in psychology, we introduce Meme Reappraisal, a novel multimodal generation task that aims to transform negatively framed memes into constructive ones while preserving their underlying scenario, entities, and structural layout. Unlike prior works on meme understanding or generation, Meme Reappraisal requires emotion-controllable, structure-preserving multimodal transformation under multiple semantic and stylistic constraints. To support this task, we construct MER-Bench, a benchmark of real-world memes with fine-grained multimodal annotations, including source and target emotions, positively rewritten meme text, visual editing specifications, and taxonomy labels covering visual type, sentiment polarity, and layout structure. We further propose a structured evaluation framework based on a multimodal large language model (MLLM)-as-a-Judge paradigm, decomposing performance into modality-level generation quality, affect controllability, structural fidelity, and global affective alignment. Extensive experiments across representative image-editing and multimodal-generation systems reveal substantial gaps in satisfying the constraints of structural preservation, semantic consistency, and affective transformation. We believe MER-Bench establishes a foundation for research on controllable meme editing and emotion-aware multimodal generation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/one-seven17/MER-Bench.
title MER-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Meme Reappraisal
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15020