Yiqi Nie
Author directory2026
MER-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Emotional Reappraisal for Image-Text Memes
Yiqi Nie | Fei Wang | Junjie Chen | Kun Li | Yudi Cai | Dan Guo | Chenglong Li | Meng Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yiqi Nie | Fei Wang | Junjie Chen | Kun Li | Yudi Cai | Dan Guo | Chenglong Li | Meng Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Multimodal Emotional Reappraisal (MER) aims to shift affective interpretation by rewriting and editing a situation without altering its underlying semantic context. Despite advances in controllable editing and sentiment transfer, MER remains challenging under coupled multimodal constraints, especially in internet memes where images, embedded text, and layout jointly encode affective meaning. To bridge this gap, we present MER-Bench, a systematic benchmark for MER on image-text memes, containing over 3,000 real-world memes with fine-grained annotations for emotion transformation and structure-preserving multimodal editing. MER-Bench spans diverse visual, textual, and structural settings and is paired with a structured MLLM-as-a-Judge evaluation suite, comprising eight fine-grained metrics and three aggregated objectives for emotional alignment, content fidelity, and transformation strength. Extensive evaluation of 14 advanced multimodal models reveals that: current models struggle to jointly balance affect, semantics, structure, and text; strong visual editing does not imply effective MER, with poor embedded text rendering and affect-aware rewriting remaining key bottlenecks. Our results identify MER as a critical capability gap in current multimodal generation systems and highlight affective image-text reasoning as a key challenge for future work.