The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes

Douwe Kiela, Hamed Firooz, Aravind Mohan, Vedanuj Goswami, Amanpreet Singh, Pratik Ringshia, Davide Testuggine

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020)

This work proposes a new challenge set for multimodal classification, focusing on detecting hate speech in multimodal memes. It is constructed such that unimodal models struggle and only multimodal models can succeed: difficult examples (“benign confounders”) are added to the dataset to make it hard to rely on unimodal signals. The task requires subtle reasoning, yet is straightforward to evaluate as a binary classification problem. We provide baseline performance numbers for unimodal models, as well as for multimodal models with various degrees of sophistication. We find that state-of-the-art methods perform poorly compared to humans, illustrating the difficulty of the task and highlighting the challenge that this important problem poses to the community.