Text or Image? What is More Important in Cross-Domain Generalization Capabilities of Hate Meme Detection Models?

Piush Aggarwal, Jawar Mehrabanian, Weigang Huang, Özge Alacam, Torsten Zesch


Abstract
This paper delves into the formidable challenge of cross-domain generalization in multimodal hate meme detection, presenting compelling findings. We provide evidence supporting the hypothesis that only the textual component of hateful memes enables the multimodal classifier to generalize across different domains, while the image component proves highly sensitive to a specific training dataset. The evidence includes demonstrations showing that hate-text classifiers perform similarly to hate-meme classifiers in a zero-shot setting. Simultaneously, the introduction of captions generated from images of memes to the hate-meme classifier worsens performance by an average F1 of 0.02. Through blackbox explanations, we identify a substantial contribution of the text modality (average of 83%), which diminishes with the introduction of meme’s image captions (52%). Additionally, our evaluation on a newly created confounder dataset reveals higher performance on text confounders as compared to image confounders with average ∆F1 of 0.18.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-eacl.8
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
104–117
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Piush Aggarwal, Jawar Mehrabanian, Weigang Huang, Özge Alacam, and Torsten Zesch. 2024. Text or Image? What is More Important in Cross-Domain Generalization Capabilities of Hate Meme Detection Models?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, pages 104–117, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text or Image? What is More Important in Cross-Domain Generalization Capabilities of Hate Meme Detection Models? (Aggarwal et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.8.pdf