Ming Shan Hee

Rui Cao, Ming Shan Hee, Adriel Kuek et al.

Hateful meme detection is a challenging multimodal task that requires comprehension of both vision and language, as well as cross-modal interactions. Recent studies have tried to fine-tune pre-trained vision-language models (PVLMs) for this task. However, with increasing model sizes, it becomes important to leverage powerful PVLMs more efficiently, rather than simply fine-tuning them. Recently, researchers have attempted to convert meme images into textual captions and prompt language models for predictions. This approach has shown good performance but suffers from non-informative image captions. Considering the two factors mentioned above, we propose a probing-based captioning approach to leverage PVLMs in a zero-shot visual question answering (VQA) manner. Specifically, we prompt a frozen PVLM by asking hateful content-related questions and use the answers as image captions (which we call Pro-Cap), so that the captions contain information critical for hateful content detection. The good performance of models with Pro-Cap on three benchmarks validates the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method.

Ming Shan Hee, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Wen-Haw Chong

Hateful meme detection is a new multimodal task that has gained significant traction in academic and industry research communities. Recently, researchers have applied pre-trained visual-linguistic models to perform the multimodal classification task, and some of these solutions have yielded promising results. However, what these visual-linguistic models learn for the hateful meme classification task remains unclear. For instance, it is unclear if these models are able to capture the derogatory or slurs references in multimodality (i.e., image and text) of the hateful memes. To fill this research gap, this paper propose three research questions to improve our understanding of these visual-linguistic models performing the hateful meme classification task. We found that the image modality contributes more to the hateful meme classification task, and the visual-linguistic models are able to perform visual-text slurs grounding to a certain extent. Our error analysis also shows that the visual-linguistic models have acquired biases, which resulted in false-positive predictions.

Yuhao Wu, Ming Shan Hee, Zhiqing Hu et al.

Current benchmarks like Needle-in-a-Haystack (NIAH), Ruler, and Needlebench focus on models' ability to understand long-context input sequences but fail to capture a critical dimension: the generation of high-quality long-form text. Applications such as design proposals, technical documentation, and creative writing rely on coherent, instruction-following outputs over extended sequences - a challenge that existing benchmarks do not adequately address. To fill this gap, we introduce LongGenBench, a novel benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate large language models' (LLMs) ability to generate long text while adhering to complex instructions. Through tasks requiring specific events or constraints within generated text, LongGenBench evaluates model performance across four distinct scenarios, three instruction types, and two generation-lengths (16K and 32K tokens). Our evaluation of ten state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that, despite strong results on Ruler, all models struggled with long text generation on LongGenBench, particularly as text length increased. This suggests that current LLMs are not yet equipped to meet the demands of real-world, long-form text generation.

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz et al. · cambridge

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region of extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, yet it remains significantly underrepresented in vision-language (VL) research. This often results in artificial intelligence (AI) models that fail to capture SEA cultural nuances. To fill this gap, we present SEA-VL, an open-source initiative dedicated to developing high-quality, culturally relevant data for SEA languages. By involving contributors from SEA countries, SEA-VL aims to ensure better cultural relevance and diversity, fostering greater inclusivity of underrepresented languages in VL research. Beyond crowdsourcing, our initiative goes one step further in the exploration of the automatic collection of culturally relevant images through crawling and image generation. First, we find that image crawling achieves approximately ~85% cultural relevance while being more cost- and time-efficient than crowdsourcing. Second, despite the substantial progress in generative vision models, synthetic images remain unreliable in accurately reflecting SEA cultures. The generated images often fail to reflect the nuanced traditions and cultural contexts of the region. Collectively, we gather 1.28M SEA culturally-relevant images, more than 50 times larger than other existing datasets. Through SEA-VL, we aim to bridge the representation gap in SEA, fostering the development of more inclusive AI systems that authentically represent diverse cultures across SEA.

Ming Shan Hee, Aditi Kumaresan, Nguyen Khoi Hoang et al.

The rise of social media platforms has brought about a new digital culture called memes. Memes, which combine visuals and text, can strongly influence public opinions on social and cultural issues. As a result, people have become interested in categorizing memes, leading to the development of various datasets and multimodal models that show promising results in this field. However, there is currently a lack of a single library that allows for the reproduction, evaluation, and comparison of these models using fair benchmarks and settings. To fill this gap, we introduce the Meme Analytical Tool Kit (MATK), an open-source toolkit specifically designed to support existing memes datasets and cutting-edge multimodal models. MATK aims to assist researchers and engineers in training and reproducing these multimodal models for meme classification tasks, while also providing analysis techniques to gain insights into their strengths and weaknesses. To access MATK, please visit \url{https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/MATK}.

K2 Team, Zhengzhong Liu, Liping Tang et al.

We introduce K2-V2, a 360-open LLM built from scratch as a superior base for reasoning adaptation, in addition to functions such as conversation and knowledge retrieval from general LLMs. It stands as the strongest fully open model, rivals open-weight leaders in its size class, outperforms Qwen2.5-72B and approaches the performance of Qwen3-235B. We actively infuse domain knowledge, reasoning, long-context, and tool use throughout the training process. This explicitly prepares the model for complex reasoning tasks. We demonstrate this potential using simple supervised fine-tuning, establishing a strong baseline that indicates significant headroom for advanced alignment. By releasing the full training history and data composition, we maximize the effectiveness of continuous training, a key open source production scenario. We release the model weights and signature LLM360 artifacts, such as complete training data, to empower the community with a capable, reasoning-centric foundation.

Yujia Hu, Ming Shan Hee, Preslav Nakov et al.

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed natural language processing; however, their safety mechanisms remain under-explored in low-resource, multilingual settings. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we introduce \textsf{SGToxicGuard}, a novel dataset and evaluation framework for benchmarking LLM safety in Singapore's diverse linguistic context, including Singlish, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. SGToxicGuard adopts a red-teaming approach to systematically probe LLM vulnerabilities in three real-world scenarios: \textit{conversation}, \textit{question-answering}, and \textit{content composition}. We conduct extensive experiments with state-of-the-art multilingual LLMs, and the results uncover critical gaps in their safety guardrails. By offering actionable insights into cultural sensitivity and toxicity mitigation, we lay the foundation for safer and more inclusive AI systems in linguistically diverse environments.\footnote{Link to the dataset: https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/SGToxicGuard.} \textcolor{red}{Disclaimer: This paper contains sensitive content that may be disturbing to some readers.}

Han Wang, Ming Shan Hee, Md Rabiul Awal et al.

Recent research has focused on using large language models (LLMs) to generate explanations for hate speech through fine-tuning or prompting. Despite the growing interest in this area, these generated explanations' effectiveness and potential limitations remain poorly understood. A key concern is that these explanations, generated by LLMs, may lead to erroneous judgments about the nature of flagged content by both users and content moderators. For instance, an LLM-generated explanation might inaccurately convince a content moderator that a benign piece of content is hateful. In light of this, we propose an analytical framework for examining hate speech explanations and conducted an extensive survey on evaluating such explanations. Specifically, we prompted GPT-3 to generate explanations for both hateful and non-hateful content, and a survey was conducted with 2,400 unique respondents to evaluate the generated explanations. Our findings reveal that (1) human evaluators rated the GPT-generated explanations as high quality in terms of linguistic fluency, informativeness, persuasiveness, and logical soundness, (2) the persuasive nature of these explanations, however, varied depending on the prompting strategy employed, and (3) this persuasiveness may result in incorrect judgments about the hatefulness of the content. Our study underscores the need for caution in applying LLM-generated explanations for content moderation. Code and results are available at https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/GPT3-HateEval.

Ming Shan Hee, Wen-Haw Chong, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Recent studies have proposed models that yielded promising performance for the hateful meme classification task. Nevertheless, these proposed models do not generate interpretable explanations that uncover the underlying meaning and support the classification output. A major reason for the lack of explainable hateful meme methods is the absence of a hateful meme dataset that contains ground truth explanations for benchmarking or training. Intuitively, having such explanations can educate and assist content moderators in interpreting and removing flagged hateful memes. This paper address this research gap by introducing Hateful meme with Reasons Dataset (HatReD), which is a new multimodal hateful meme dataset annotated with the underlying hateful contextual reasons. We also define a new conditional generation task that aims to automatically generate underlying reasons to explain hateful memes and establish the baseline performance of state-of-the-art pre-trained language models on this task. We further demonstrate the usefulness of HatReD by analyzing the challenges of the new conditional generation task in explaining memes in seen and unseen domains. The dataset and benchmark models are made available here: https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/HatRed

Han Wang, Nirmalendu Prakash, Nguyen Khoi Hoang et al.

Topic modeling is a widely used technique for revealing underlying thematic structures within textual data. However, existing models have certain limitations, particularly when dealing with short text datasets that lack co-occurring words. Moreover, these models often neglect sentence-level semantics, focusing primarily on token-level semantics. In this paper, we propose PromptTopic, a novel topic modeling approach that harnesses the advanced language understanding of large language models (LLMs) to address these challenges. It involves extracting topics at the sentence level from individual documents, then aggregating and condensing these topics into a predefined quantity, ultimately providing coherent topics for texts of varying lengths. This approach eliminates the need for manual parameter tuning and improves the quality of extracted topics. We benchmark PromptTopic against the state-of-the-art baselines on three vastly diverse datasets, establishing its proficiency in discovering meaningful topics. Furthermore, qualitative analysis showcases PromptTopic's ability to uncover relevant topics in multiple datasets.

Ming Shan Hee, Shivam Sharma, Rui Cao et al.

In the evolving landscape of online communication, moderating hate speech (HS) presents an intricate challenge, compounded by the multimodal nature of digital content. This comprehensive survey delves into the recent strides in HS moderation, spotlighting the burgeoning role of large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs). Our exploration begins with a thorough analysis of current literature, revealing the nuanced interplay between textual, visual, and auditory elements in propagating HS. We uncover a notable trend towards integrating these modalities, primarily due to the complexity and subtlety with which HS is disseminated. A significant emphasis is placed on the advances facilitated by LLMs and LMMs, which have begun to redefine the boundaries of detection and moderation capabilities. We identify existing gaps in research, particularly in the context of underrepresented languages and cultures, and the need for solutions to handle low-resource settings. The survey concludes with a forward-looking perspective, outlining potential avenues for future research, including the exploration of novel AI methodologies, the ethical governance of AI in moderation, and the development of more nuanced, context-aware systems. This comprehensive overview aims to catalyze further research and foster a collaborative effort towards more sophisticated, responsible, and human-centric approaches to HS moderation in the digital era. WARNING: This paper contains offensive examples.

Nirmalendu Prakash, Han Wang, Nguyen Khoi Hoang et al.

The proliferation of social media has given rise to a new form of communication: memes. Memes are multimodal and often contain a combination of text and visual elements that convey meaning, humor, and cultural significance. While meme analysis has been an active area of research, little work has been done on unsupervised multimodal topic modeling of memes, which is important for content moderation, social media analysis, and cultural studies. We propose \textsf{PromptMTopic}, a novel multimodal prompt-based model designed to learn topics from both text and visual modalities by leveraging the language modeling capabilities of large language models. Our model effectively extracts and clusters topics learned from memes, considering the semantic interaction between the text and visual modalities. We evaluate our proposed model through extensive experiments on three real-world meme datasets, which demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art topic modeling baselines in learning descriptive topics in memes. Additionally, our qualitative analysis shows that \textsf{PromptMTopic} can identify meaningful and culturally relevant topics from memes. Our work contributes to the understanding of the topics and themes of memes, a crucial form of communication in today's society.\\ \red{\textbf{Disclaimer: This paper contains sensitive content that may be disturbing to some readers.}}

Yuhao Wu, Yushi Bai, Zhiqing Hu et al. · tsinghua

Recent advancements in long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) have primarily concentrated on processing extended input contexts, resulting in significant strides in long-context comprehension. However, the equally critical aspect of generating long-form outputs has received comparatively less attention. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift in NLP research toward addressing the challenges of long-output generation. Tasks such as novel writing, long-term planning, and complex reasoning require models to understand extensive contexts and produce coherent, contextually rich, and logically consistent extended text. These demands highlight a critical gap in current LLM capabilities. We underscore the importance of this under-explored domain and call for focused efforts to develop foundational LLMs tailored for generating high-quality, long-form outputs, which hold immense potential for real-world applications.

Ri Chi Ng, Nirmalendu Prakash, Ming Shan Hee et al.

To address the limitations of current hate speech detection models, we introduce \textsf{SGHateCheck}, a novel framework designed for the linguistic and cultural context of Singapore and Southeast Asia. It extends the functional testing approach of HateCheck and MHC, employing large language models for translation and paraphrasing into Singapore's main languages, and refining these with native annotators. \textsf{SGHateCheck} reveals critical flaws in state-of-the-art models, highlighting their inadequacy in sensitive content moderation. This work aims to foster the development of more effective hate speech detection tools for diverse linguistic environments, particularly for Singapore and Southeast Asia contexts.

Ming Shan Hee, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Hateful meme detection presents a significant challenge as a multimodal task due to the complexity of interpreting implicit hate messages and contextual cues within memes. Previous approaches have fine-tuned pre-trained vision-language models (PT-VLMs), leveraging the knowledge they gained during pre-training and their attention mechanisms to understand meme content. However, the reliance of these models on implicit knowledge and complex attention mechanisms renders their decisions difficult to explain, which is crucial for building trust in meme classification. In this paper, we introduce IntMeme, a novel framework that leverages Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for hateful meme classification with explainable decisions. IntMeme addresses the dual challenges of improving both accuracy and explainability in meme moderation. The framework uses LMMs to generate human-like, interpretive analyses of memes, providing deeper insights into multimodal content and context. Additionally, it uses independent encoding modules for both memes and their interpretations, which are then combined to enhance classification performance. Our approach addresses the opacity and misclassification issues associated with PT-VLMs, optimizing the use of LMMs for hateful meme detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of IntMeme through comprehensive experiments across three datasets, showcasing its superiority over state-of-the-art models.

Gionnieve Lim, Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Kellie Yu Hui Sim et al.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a dual challenge in the fight against disinformation. These powerful tools, capable of generating human-like text at scale, can be weaponised to produce sophisticated and persuasive disinformation, yet they also hold promise for enhancing detection and mitigation strategies. This paper investigates the complex dynamics between LLMs and disinformation through a communication game that simulates online forums, inspired by the game Werewolf, with 25 participants. We analyse how Disinformers, Moderators, and Users leverage LLMs to advance their goals, revealing both the potential for misuse and combating disinformation. Our findings highlight the varying uses of LLMs depending on the participants' roles and strategies, underscoring the importance of understanding their effectiveness in this context. We conclude by discussing implications for future LLM development and online platform design, advocating for a balanced approach that empowers users and fosters trust while mitigating the risks of LLM-assisted disinformation.

Artur Muratov, Hana Fatima Shaikh, Vanshikaa Jani et al.

We present FRaN-X, a Framing and Narratives Explorer that automatically detects entity mentions and classifies their narrative roles directly from raw text. FRaN-X comprises a two-stage system that combines sequence labeling with fine-grained role classification to reveal how entities are portrayed as protagonists, antagonists, or innocents, using a unique taxonomy of 22 fine-grained roles nested under these three main categories. The system supports five languages (Bulgarian, English, Hindi, Russian, and Portuguese) and two domains (the Russia-Ukraine Conflict and Climate Change). It provides an interactive web interface for media analysts to explore and compare framing across different sources, tackling the challenge of automatically detecting and labeling how entities are framed. Our system allows end users to focus on a single article as well as analyze up to four articles simultaneously. We provide aggregate level analysis including an intuitive graph visualization that highlights the narrative a group of articles are pushing. Our system includes a search feature for users to look up entities of interest, along with a timeline view that allows analysts to track an entity's role transitions across different contexts within the article. The FRaN-X system and the trained models are licensed under an MIT License. FRaN-X is publicly accessible at https://fran-x.streamlit.app/ and a video demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/VZVi-1B6yYk.

Nirmalendu Prakash, Ming Shan Hee, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Total Defence is a defence policy combining and extending the concept of military defence and civil defence. While several countries have adopted total defence as their defence policy, very few studies have investigated its effectiveness. With the rapid proliferation of social media and digitalisation, many social studies have been focused on investigating policy effectiveness through specially curated surveys and questionnaires either through digital media or traditional forms. However, such references may not truly reflect the underlying sentiments about the target policies or initiatives of interest. People are more likely to express their sentiment using communication mediums such as starting topic thread on forums or sharing memes on social media. Using Singapore as a case reference, this study aims to address this research gap by proposing TotalDefMeme, a large-scale multi-modal and multi-attribute meme dataset that captures public sentiments toward Singapore's Total Defence policy. Besides supporting social informatics and public policy analysis of the Total Defence policy, TotalDefMeme can also support many downstream multi-modal machine learning tasks, such as aspect-based stance classification and multi-modal meme clustering. We perform baseline machine learning experiments on TotalDefMeme and evaluate its technical validity, and present possible future interdisciplinary research directions and application scenarios using the dataset as a baseline.