Evolver: Chain-of-Evolution Prompting to Boost Large Multimodal Models for Hateful Meme Detection

Jinfa Huang, Jinsheng Pan, Zhongwei Wan, Hanjia Lyu, Jiebo Luo


Abstract
Hateful memes continuously evolve as new ones emerge by blending progressive cultural ideas, rendering existing methods that rely on extensive training obsolete or ineffective. In this work, we propose Evolver, which incorporates Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) via Chain-of-Evolution (CoE) Prompting, by integrating the evolution attribute and in-context information of memes. Specifically, Evolver simulates the evolving and expressing process of memes and reasons through LMMs in a step-by-step manner using an evolutionary pair mining module, an evolutionary information extractor, and a contextual relevance amplifier. Extensive experiments on public FHM, MAMI, and HarM datasets show that CoE prompting can be incorporated into existing LMMs to improve their performance. More encouragingly, it can serve as an interpretive tool to promote the understanding of the evolution of memes.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.489
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7321–7330
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.489/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jinfa Huang, Jinsheng Pan, Zhongwei Wan, Hanjia Lyu, and Jiebo Luo. 2025. Evolver: Chain-of-Evolution Prompting to Boost Large Multimodal Models for Hateful Meme Detection. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 7321–7330, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evolver: Chain-of-Evolution Prompting to Boost Large Multimodal Models for Hateful Meme Detection (Huang et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.489.pdf