Kaiwei Deng
2025
MIND: A Multi-agent Framework for Zero-shot Harmful Meme Detection
Ziyan Liu
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Chunxiao Fan
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Haoran Lou
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Yuexin Wu
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Kaiwei Deng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The rapid expansion of memes on social media has highlighted the urgent need for effective approaches to detect harmful content. However, traditional data-driven approaches struggle to detect new memes due to their evolving nature and the lack of up-to-date annotated data. To address this issue, we propose MIND, a multi-agent framework for zero-shot harmful meme detection that does not rely on annotated data. MIND implements three key strategies: 1) We retrieve similar memes from an unannotated reference set to provide contextual information. 2) We propose a bi-directional insight derivation mechanism to extract a comprehensive understanding of similar memes. 3) We then employ a multi-agent debate mechanism to ensure robust decision-making through reasoned arbitration. Extensive experiments on three meme datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework not only outperforms existing zero-shot approaches but also shows strong generalization across different model architectures and parameter scales, providing a scalable solution for harmful meme detection.