@inproceedings{ahmad-uddin-2026-csecu,
    title = "{CSECU}-Learners@{EEUCA} 2026: Vaccine Critical Memes Identification using Two-Stage Early Fusion of Transformers",
    author = "Ahmad, Monir  and
      Uddin, Md. Saif",
    editor = {H{\"u}rriyeto{\u{g}}lu, Ali  and
      Thapa, Surendrabikram  and
      Tanev, Hristo},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Event Extraction and Understanding: Challenges and Applications ({EEUCA} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.eeuca-1.18/",
    pages = "169--176",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-402-6",
    abstract = "Memes have emerged as a fast and influential way to share information online, particularly during major public health events like COVID-19 vaccination. While they can support awareness and encourage positive behavior, they are also widely used to spread misinformation and vaccine-critical views. These messages are often expressed through sarcasm and implicit meaning, which makes automatic detection difficult. To tackle this problem, EEUCA 2026 introduces a shared task based on the VaxMeme dataset for multimodal vaccine critical meme detection. The task encourages us to design models that can jointly understand both image and text, capturing the underlying context more effectively. In this work, we present our approach to this task by proposing a two-stage early fusion framework that integrates multiple transformer-based encoders. We train our model using focal loss to give more attention to difficult samples. Our experimental results show that our method performs competitively in the shared task, demonstrating its effectiveness for this problem."
}