D-HUMOR: Dark Humor Understanding via Multimodal Open-ended Reasoning
Authors: name: Sai Kartheek Reddy Kasu; name: Mohammad Zia Ur Rehman; name: Shahid Shafi Dar; name: Rishi Bharat Junghare; name: Dhanvin Sanjay Namboodiri; name: Nagendra Kumar
Published: 2025-09-08 14:55:16

Abstract: Dark humor in online memes poses unique challenges due to its reliance on
implicit, sensitive, and culturally contextual cues. To address the lack of
resources and methods for detecting dark humor in multimodal content, we
introduce a novel dataset of 4,379 Reddit memes annotated for dark humor,
target category (gender, mental health, violence, race, disability, and other),
and a three-level intensity rating (mild, moderate, severe). Building on this
resource, we propose a reasoning-augmented framework that first generates
structured explanations for each meme using a Large Vision-Language Model
(VLM). Through a Role-Reversal Self-Loop, VLM adopts the author's perspective
to iteratively refine its explanations, ensuring completeness and alignment. We
then extract textual features from both the OCR transcript and the self-refined
reasoning via a text encoder, while visual features are obtained using a vision
transformer. A Tri-stream Cross-Reasoning Network (TCRNet) fuses these three
streams, text, image, and reasoning, via pairwise attention mechanisms,
producing a unified representation for classification. Experimental results
demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong baselines across three tasks:
dark humor detection, target identification, and intensity prediction. The
dataset, annotations, and code are released to facilitate further research in
multimodal humor understanding and content moderation. Code and Dataset are
available at:
https://github.com/Sai-Kartheek-Reddy/D-Humor-Dark-Humor-Understanding-via-Multimodal-Open-ended-Reasoning