@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-lilymeme,
    title = "{L}ily{M}eme@{EEUCA} 2026: Multimodal Vaccine Meme Stance Detection with Task-Adapted {M}eme{CLIP} and Complementary Ensembling",
    author = "Li, Yixuan  and
      Yin, Xiaolong  and
      Yang, Yang",
    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-1.23/",
    pages = "208--215",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-402-6",
    abstract = "Memes have emerged as a prominent medium for conveying public sentiment on sensitive health topics such as vaccination. Unlike conventional multimodal tasks, memes feature implicit stances, sarcastic nuances, and complex cross-modal interactions, posing significant challenges for accurate stance detection. This paper presents our approach for the VaxMeme Shared Task @EEUCA 2026, which aims to classify vaccine-related memes into three distinct classes: Vaccine-critical, Neutral, and Pro-vaccine. Building upon MemeCLIP, we systematically enhance our framework via task-specific adaptation, lightweight cross-modal fusion, noise-aware training, LLM-assisted semantic augmentation, and inference-stage optimization, ultimately ensembling multiple complementary variants for final predictions. Our ensemble method achieves a Macro-F1 score of 0.8494 on the official test set, securing first place and demonstrating the critical efficacy of noise-aware training and late-stage ensembling for robust stance identification."
}