# Domain-aware Self-supervised Pre-training for Label-Efficient Meme Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14667 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14667/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02243/) (2019)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [SimVLM: Simple Visual Language Model Pretraining with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10904/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04790/) (2020)
- [Multimodal datasets: misogyny, pornography, and malignant stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01963/) (2021)
- [WIT: Wikipedia-based Image Text Dataset for Multimodal Multilingual Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01913/) (2021)
- [Visual Semantic Reasoning for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02701/) (2019)
- [Supervised Multimodal Bitransformers for Classifying Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02950/) (2019)
- [Solo-learn: A Library of Self-supervised Methods for Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01775/) (2021)
- [Exploring Hate Speech Detection in Multimodal Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03814/) (2019)
- [MOMENTA: A Multimodal Framework for Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05184/) (2021)
- [Polysemous Visual-Semantic Embedding for Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04402/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Toxic Memes: A Survey of Computational Perspectives on the Detection and Explanation of Meme Toxicities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07353/) (2024)
- [Unimodal Intermediate Training for Multimodal Meme Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00528/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing self-supervised learning strategies are constrained to either a limited set of objectives or generic downstream tasks that predominantly target uni-modal applications. This has isolated progress for imperative multi-modal applications that are diverse in terms of complexity and domain-affinity, such as meme analysis. Here, we introduce two self-supervised pre-training methods, namely Ext-PIE-Net and MM-SimCLR that (i) employ off-the-shelf multi-modal hate-speech data during pre-training and (ii) perform self-supervised learning by incorporating multiple specialized pretext tasks, effectively catering to the required complex multi-modal representation learning for meme analysis. We experiment with different self-supervision strategies, including potential variants that could help learn rich cross-modality representations and evaluate using popular linear probing on the Hateful Memes task. The proposed solutions strongly compete with the fully supervised baseline via label-efficient training while distinctly outperforming them on all three tasks of the Memotion challenge with 0.18%, 23.64%, and 0.93% performance gain, respectively. Further, we demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed solutions by reporting competitive performance on the HarMeme task. Finally, we empirically establish the quality of the learned representations by analyzing task-specific learning, using fewer labeled training samples, and arguing that the complexity of the self-supervision strategy and downstream task at hand are correlated. Our efforts highlight the requirement of better multi-modal self-supervision methods involving specialized pretext tasks for efficient fine-tuning and generalizable performance.