# Argumentative Stance Prediction: An Exploratory Study on Multimodality and Few-Shot Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07093 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07093/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
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- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [LLM-Blender: Ensembling Large Language Models with Pairwise Ranking and Generative Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02561/) (2023)
- [UniVL: A Unified Video and Language Pre-Training Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06353/) (2020)
- [Large-scale Multi-Modal Pre-trained Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10035/) (2023)
- [Question Decomposition Improves the Faithfulness of Model-Generated Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11768/) (2023)
- [ImageArg: A Multi-modal Tweet Dataset for Image Persuasiveness Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06416/) (2022)
- [Stance Prediction for Contemporary Issues: Data and Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00052/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To advance argumentative stance prediction as a multimodal problem, the First Shared Task in Multimodal Argument Mining hosted stance prediction in crucial social topics of gun control and abortion. Our exploratory study attempts to evaluate the necessity of images for stance prediction in tweets and compare out-of-the-box text-based large-language models (LLM) in few-shot settings against fine-tuned unimodal and multimodal models. Our work suggests an ensemble of fine-tuned text-based language models (0.817 F1-score) outperforms both the multimodal (0.677 F1-score) and text-based few-shot prediction using a recent state-of-the-art LLM (0.550 F1-score). In addition to the differences in performance, our findings suggest that the multimodal models tend to perform better when image content is summarized as natural language over their native pixel structure and, using in-context examples improves few-shot performance of LLMs.