# The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.04790 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04790/

## Key facts

- Cited by 490 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2020.

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## Abstract (arXiv)

This work proposes a new challenge set for multimodal classification, focusing on detecting hate speech in multimodal memes. It is constructed such that unimodal models struggle and only multimodal models can succeed: difficult examples ("benign confounders") are added to the dataset to make it hard to rely on unimodal signals. The task requires subtle reasoning, yet is straightforward to evaluate as a binary classification problem. We provide baseline performance numbers for unimodal models, as well as for multimodal models with various degrees of sophistication. We find that state-of-the-art methods perform poorly compared to humans (64.73% vs. 84.7% accuracy), illustrating the difficulty of the task and highlighting the challenge that this important problem poses to the community.