# memeBot: Towards Automatic Image Meme Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14571 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14571/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [XMeCap: Meme Caption Generation with Sub-Image Adaptability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17152/) (2024)
- [MemeCraft: Contextual and Stance-Driven Multimodal Meme Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14652/) (2024)
- [Humor in Pixels: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models Understanding of Online Comics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12248/) (2025)
- [HUMORCHAIN: Theory-Guided Multi-Stage Reasoning for Interpretable Multimodal Humor Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21732/) (2025)
- [Multi-modal application: Image Memes Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01651/) (2021)
- [From Perception to Punchline: Empowering VLM with the Art of In-the-wild Meme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24555/) (2025)
- [MER-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Meme Reappraisal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15020/) (2026)
- [TransMeme: A Multi-Agent Framework for Cross-Cultural Meme Transcreation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27127/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image memes have become a widespread tool used by people for interacting and exchanging ideas over social media, blogs, and open messengers. This work proposes to treat automatic image meme generation as a translation process, and further present an end to end neural and probabilistic approach to generate an image-based meme for any given sentence using an encoder-decoder architecture. For a given input sentence, an image meme is generated by combining a meme template image and a text caption where the meme template image is selected from a set of popular candidates using a selection module, and the meme caption is generated by an encoder-decoder model. An encoder is used to map the selected meme template and the input sentence into a meme embedding and a decoder is used to decode the meme caption from the meme embedding. The generated natural language meme caption is conditioned on the input sentence and the selected meme template. The model learns the dependencies between the meme captions and the meme template images and generates new memes using the learned dependencies. The quality of the generated captions and the generated memes is evaluated through both automated and human evaluation. An experiment is designed to score how well the generated memes can represent the tweets from Twitter conversations. Experiments on Twitter data show the efficacy of the model in generating memes for sentences in online social interaction.