SZED at ArGuard Shared Tasks: Multi-Task Label-Attention and Cross-Modal Fusion for Arabic Hateful Meme Detection

Selma Khelili, Zohra Abdeli


Abstract
We present SZED’s submission to ArGuard 2026 Track A: Arabic hateful meme detection. The task has two parts: binary classification (A1) and fine-grained multi-label tagging (A2). For A1, we fuse MARBERTv2 and CLIP ViT-L/14 embeddings, comparing concatenation, self-attention, and ensemble heads. For A2, we use a multi-task label-attention architecture with per-class query vectors and an auxiliary head for cascade calibration. We reach macro-F1 = 0.7597 on A1 and 0.3142 on A2. We report reproducibility across runs, per-class error patterns, and the effect of cascade calibration on the long-tailed A2 labels.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.48
Volume:
Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Tamer Elsayed, Houda Bouamor, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Hend Al-Khalifa, Ahmed Abdelali, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Abdellah El Mekki, Kareem Darwish, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Hamzah Luqman, Salam Khalifa, Samar Magdy, Zaid Alyafeai, Injy Hamed, Wajdi Zaghouani, Imed Zitouni
Venue:
ArabicNLP
SIG:
SIGARAB
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
386–393
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.48/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Selma Khelili and Zohra Abdeli. 2026. SZED at ArGuard Shared Tasks: Multi-Task Label-Attention and Cross-Modal Fusion for Arabic Hateful Meme Detection. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 386–393, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SZED at ArGuard Shared Tasks: Multi-Task Label-Attention and Cross-Modal Fusion for Arabic Hateful Meme Detection (Khelili & Abdeli, ArabicNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.48.pdf