# FiLMing Multimodal Sarcasm Detection with Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.00416 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00416/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12327/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [Reasoning with Sarcasm by Reading In-between](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02856/) (2018)
- [Are Safer Looking Neighborhoods More Lively? A Multimodal Investigation into Urban Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00462/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Debiasing Multimodal Sarcasm Detection with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10493/) (2023)
- [MuVaC: A Variational Causal Framework for Multimodal Sarcasm Understanding in Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20451/) (2026)
- [PC-MNet: Dual-Level Congruity Modeling for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection via Polarity-Modulated Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02447/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sarcasm detection identifies natural language expressions whose intended meaning is different from what is implied by its surface meaning. It finds applications in many NLP tasks such as opinion mining, sentiment analysis, etc. Today, social media has given rise to an abundant amount of multimodal data where users express their opinions through text and images. Our paper aims to leverage multimodal data to improve the performance of the existing systems for sarcasm detection. So far, various approaches have been proposed that uses text and image modality and a fusion of both. We propose a novel architecture that uses the RoBERTa model with a co-attention layer on top to incorporate context incongruity between input text and image attributes. Further, we integrate feature-wise affine transformation by conditioning the input image through FiLMed ResNet blocks with the textual features using the GRU network to capture the multimodal information. The output from both the models and the CLS token from RoBERTa is concatenated and used for the final prediction. Our results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art method by 6.14% F1 score on the public Twitter multimodal sarcasm detection dataset.
