Papers › SAFE-MEME: Structured Reasoning Framework for Robust Hate Speech Detection in Memes
SAFE-MEME: Structured Reasoning Framework for Robust Hate Speech Detection in Memes
Palash Nandi, Shivam Sharma, Tanmoy Chakraborty
Memes act as cryptic tools for sharing sensitive ideas, often requiring contextual knowledge to interpret. This makes moderating multimodal memes challenging, as existing works either lack high-quality datasets on nuanced hate categories or rely on low-quality social media visuals. Here, we curate two novel multimodal hate speech datasets, MHS and MHS-Con, that capture fine-grained hateful abstractions in regular and confounding scenarios, respectively. We benchmark these datasets against several competing baselines. Furthermore, we introduce SAFE-MEME (Structured reAsoning FramEwork), a novel multimodal Chain-of-Thought-based framework employing Q&A-style reasoning (SAFE-MEME-QA) and hierarchical categorization (SAFE-MEME-H) to enable robust hate speech detection in memes. SAFE-MEME-QA outperforms existing baselines, achieving an average improvement of approximately 5% and 4% on MHS and MHS-Con, respectively. In comparison, SAFE-MEME-H achieves an average improvement of 6% in MHS while outperforming only multimodal baselines in MHS-Con. We show that fine-tuning a single-layer adapter within SAFE-MEME-H outperforms fully fine-tuned models in regular fine-grained hateful meme detection. However, the fully fine-tuning approach with a Q&A setup is more effective for handling confounding cases. We also systematically examine the error cases, offering valuable insights into the robustness and limitations of the proposed structured reasoning framework for analyzing hateful memes.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections