# Prompting for Multimodal Hateful Meme Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04156 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04156/

## Key facts

- Cited by 69 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [ClipCap: CLIP Prefix for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09734/) (2021)
- [Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00598/) (2022)
- [The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04790/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of GPT-3 for Few-Shot Knowledge-Based VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05014/) (2021)
- [A Simple Method for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02847/) (2018)
- [Commonsense Knowledge Mining from Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00505/) (2019)
- [CPT: Colorful Prompt Tuning for Pre-trained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11797/) (2021)
- [oLMpics -- On what Language Model Pre-training Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13283/) (2019)
- [Supervised Multimodal Bitransformers for Classifying Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02950/) (2019)
- [KAT: A Knowledge Augmented Transformer for Vision-and-Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08614/) (2021)
- [Exploring Hate Speech Detection in Multimodal Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03814/) (2019)
- [FairFace: Face Attribute Dataset for Balanced Race, Gender, and Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04913/) (2019)
- [MOMENTA: A Multimodal Framework for Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05184/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Pro-Cap: Leveraging a Frozen Vision-Language Model for Hateful Meme Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08088/) (2023)
- [Decoding the Underlying Meaning of Multimodal Hateful Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17678/) (2023)
- [ICL-D3IE: In-Context Learning with Diverse Demonstrations Updating for Document Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05063/) (2023)
- [MemeCLIP: Leveraging CLIP Representations for Multimodal Meme Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14703/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Hate Speech Moderation: Multimodality and the Role of Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16727/) (2024)
- [MultiHateClip: A Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Hateful Video Detection on YouTube and Bilibili](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03468/) (2024)
- [Towards Low-Resource Harmful Meme Detection with LMM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05383/) (2024)
- [Improving Hateful Meme Detection through Retrieval-Guided Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08110/) (2023)
- [Mapping Memes to Words for Multimodal Hateful Meme Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08368/) (2023)
- [Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13298/) (2024)
- [Read, Diagnose and Chat: Towards Explainable and Interactive LLMs-Augmented Depression Detection in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05138/) (2023)
- [Modularized Networks for Few-shot Hateful Meme Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11845/) (2024)
- [MIND: A Multi-agent Framework for Zero-shot Harmful Meme Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06908/) (2025)
- [Debiasing Multimodal Sarcasm Detection with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10493/) (2023)
- [Toxic Memes: A Survey of Computational Perspectives on the Detection and Explanation of Meme Toxicities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07353/) (2024)
- [Towards Comprehensive Detection of Chinese Harmful Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02378/) (2024)
- [TotalDefMeme: A Multi-Attribute Meme dataset on Total Defence in Singapore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17911/) (2023)
- [MemeMQA: Multimodal Question Answering for Memes via Rationale-Based Inferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11215/) (2024)
- [Robust Adaptation of Large Multimodal Models for Retrieval Augmented Hateful Meme Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13061/) (2025)
- [ImpliHateVid: A Benchmark Dataset and Two-stage Contrastive Learning Framework for Implicit Hate Speech Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06570/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Limits of Zero Shot Vision Language Models for Hate Meme Detection: The Vulnerabilities and their Interpretations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12198/) (2024)
- [MemeIntel: Explainable Detection of Propagandistic and Hateful Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16612/) (2025)
- [MemeCraft: Contextual and Stance-Driven Multimodal Meme Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14652/) (2024)
- [Cross-Modal Transfer from Memes to Videos: Addressing Data Scarcity in Hateful Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15438/) (2025)
- [Just KIDDIN: Knowledge Infusion and Distillation for Detection of INdecent Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12174/) (2024)
- [Deciphering Hate: Identifying Hateful Memes and Their Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10829/) (2024)
- [Read as You See: Guiding Unimodal LLMs for Low-Resource Explainable Harmful Meme Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08477/) (2025)
- [Multi-Modal Discussion Transformer: Integrating Text, Images and Graph Transformers to Detect Hate Speech on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09312/) (2023)
- [MemeLens: Multilingual Multitask VLMs for Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12539/) (2026)
- [Contextualizing Internet Memes Across Social Media Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11157/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hateful meme classification is a challenging multimodal task that requires complex reasoning and contextual background knowledge. Ideally, we could leverage an explicit external knowledge base to supplement contextual and cultural information in hateful memes. However, there is no known explicit external knowledge base that could provide such hate speech contextual information. To address this gap, we propose PromptHate, a simple yet effective prompt-based model that prompts pre-trained language models (PLMs) for hateful meme classification. Specifically, we construct simple prompts and provide a few in-context examples to exploit the implicit knowledge in the pre-trained RoBERTa language model for hateful meme classification. We conduct extensive experiments on two publicly available hateful and offensive meme datasets. Our experimental results show that PromptHate is able to achieve a high AUC of 90.96, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines on the hateful meme classification task. We also perform fine-grained analyses and case studies on various prompt settings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the prompts on hateful meme classification.