Shiv Ram Saud

Author directory

2026

In this paper, we describe our participation in the Shared Task on Multimodal Identification of Vaccine Critical Content on Social Media (VaxMeme) of EEUCA 2026, a satellite of ACL 2026. We tackle the classification of Twitter-based vaccine memes into anti-vaccine, neutral, and pro-vaccine categories using the VaxMeme dataset with 8,195 train, 1,024 val, and 1,025 test samples. We experiment with two different architecture families: (i) Multimodal hybrids: CLIP ViT-B/32 for images + BERT-based models for texts (BERT-base-uncased, ModernBERT) with late fusion strategy based on concatenation of L2-normalized feature vectors and (ii) Text-only: pre-trained models for texts (BERT-base-uncased, RoBERTa-base, ModernBERT-base, DistilBERT-base, Deberta-v3-base) for post_text. In both cases, we use a three-layer feed-forward network with GELU activation for classification. We use class-weighted cross-entropy loss, differential learning rates, AdamW optimizer, gradient accumulation, OneCycleLR scheduler, and early stopping on the val set for optimization. Data augmentation is applied for the multimodal CLIP-based approach only. The winning approach among those tested is the text-only BERT-base-uncased with a macro-F1 of 0.8102 which is ahead of the performance of the CLIP + BERT-base hybrid model, which achieves a test macro-F1 of 0.7603.