@inproceedings{ouyang-etal-2025-punchbench,
title = "{P}unch{B}ench: Benchmarking {MLLM}s in Multimodal Punchline Comprehension",
author = "Ouyang, Kun and
Liu, Yuanxin and
Li, Shicheng and
Liu, Yi and
Zhou, Hao and
Meng, Fandong and
Zhou, Jie and
Sun, Xu",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.49/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.49",
pages = "986--1008",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
abstract = "Multimodal punchlines, which involve humor or sarcasm conveyed in image-caption pairs, are a popular way of communication on online multimedia platforms. With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), it is essential to assess their ability to effectively comprehend these punchlines. However, existing benchmarks on punchline comprehension suffer from three major limitations: 1) language shortcuts that allow models to solely rely on text, 2) lack of question diversity, and 3) narrow focus on a specific domain of multimodal content (e.g., cartoon). To address these limitations, we introduce a multimodal **Punch**line comprehension **Bench**mark, named **PunchBench**, which is tailored for accurate and comprehensive evaluation of punchline comprehension. To enhance the evaluation accuracy, we generate synonymous and antonymous captions by modifying original captions, which mitigates the impact of shortcuts in the captions. To provide a comprehensive evaluation, PunchBench incorporates diverse question formats and image-captions from various domains. On this basis, we conduct extensive evaluations and reveal a significant gap between state-of-the-art MLLMs and humans in punchline comprehension. To improve punchline comprehension, we propose Simple-to-Complex Chain-of-Question (SC-CoQ) strategy, enabling the models to incrementally address complicated questions by first mastering simple ones. SC-CoQ effectively enhances the performance of various MLLMs on PunchBench, surpassing in-context learning and chain-of-thought."
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<abstract>Multimodal punchlines, which involve humor or sarcasm conveyed in image-caption pairs, are a popular way of communication on online multimedia platforms. With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), it is essential to assess their ability to effectively comprehend these punchlines. However, existing benchmarks on punchline comprehension suffer from three major limitations: 1) language shortcuts that allow models to solely rely on text, 2) lack of question diversity, and 3) narrow focus on a specific domain of multimodal content (e.g., cartoon). To address these limitations, we introduce a multimodal **Punch**line comprehension **Bench**mark, named **PunchBench**, which is tailored for accurate and comprehensive evaluation of punchline comprehension. To enhance the evaluation accuracy, we generate synonymous and antonymous captions by modifying original captions, which mitigates the impact of shortcuts in the captions. To provide a comprehensive evaluation, PunchBench incorporates diverse question formats and image-captions from various domains. On this basis, we conduct extensive evaluations and reveal a significant gap between state-of-the-art MLLMs and humans in punchline comprehension. To improve punchline comprehension, we propose Simple-to-Complex Chain-of-Question (SC-CoQ) strategy, enabling the models to incrementally address complicated questions by first mastering simple ones. SC-CoQ effectively enhances the performance of various MLLMs on PunchBench, surpassing in-context learning and chain-of-thought.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T PunchBench: Benchmarking MLLMs in Multimodal Punchline Comprehension
%A Ouyang, Kun
%A Liu, Yuanxin
%A Li, Shicheng
%A Liu, Yi
%A Zhou, Hao
%A Meng, Fandong
%A Zhou, Jie
%A Sun, Xu
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-251-0
%F ouyang-etal-2025-punchbench
%X Multimodal punchlines, which involve humor or sarcasm conveyed in image-caption pairs, are a popular way of communication on online multimedia platforms. With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), it is essential to assess their ability to effectively comprehend these punchlines. However, existing benchmarks on punchline comprehension suffer from three major limitations: 1) language shortcuts that allow models to solely rely on text, 2) lack of question diversity, and 3) narrow focus on a specific domain of multimodal content (e.g., cartoon). To address these limitations, we introduce a multimodal **Punch**line comprehension **Bench**mark, named **PunchBench**, which is tailored for accurate and comprehensive evaluation of punchline comprehension. To enhance the evaluation accuracy, we generate synonymous and antonymous captions by modifying original captions, which mitigates the impact of shortcuts in the captions. To provide a comprehensive evaluation, PunchBench incorporates diverse question formats and image-captions from various domains. On this basis, we conduct extensive evaluations and reveal a significant gap between state-of-the-art MLLMs and humans in punchline comprehension. To improve punchline comprehension, we propose Simple-to-Complex Chain-of-Question (SC-CoQ) strategy, enabling the models to incrementally address complicated questions by first mastering simple ones. SC-CoQ effectively enhances the performance of various MLLMs on PunchBench, surpassing in-context learning and chain-of-thought.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.49
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.49/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.49
%P 986-1008
Markdown (Informal)
[PunchBench: Benchmarking MLLMs in Multimodal Punchline Comprehension](https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.49/) (Ouyang et al., ACL 2025)
ACL
- Kun Ouyang, Yuanxin Liu, Shicheng Li, Yi Liu, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, and Xu Sun. 2025. PunchBench: Benchmarking MLLMs in Multimodal Punchline Comprehension. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 986–1008, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.