HumorDB: Can AI understand graphical humor?

Despite significant advancements in image segmentation and object detection, understanding complex scenes remains a significant challenge. Here, we focus on graphical humor as a paradigmatic example of image interpretation that requires elucidating the interaction of different scene elements in the context of prior cognitive knowledge. This paper introduces HumorDB, a novel, controlled, and carefully curated dataset designed to evaluate and advance visual humor understanding by AI systems. The dataset comprises diverse images spanning photos, cartoons, sketches, and AI-generated content, including minimally contrastive pairs where subtle edits differentiate between humorous and non-humorous versions. We evaluate humans, state-of-the-art vision models, and large vision-language models on three tasks: binary humor classification, funniness rating prediction, and pairwise humor comparison. The results reveal a gap between current AI systems and human-level humor understanding. While pretrained vision-language models perform better than vision-only models, they still struggle with abstract sketches and subtle humor cues. Analysis of attention maps shows that even when models correctly classify humorous images, they often fail to focus on the precise regions that make the image funny. Preliminary mechanistic interpretability studies and evaluation of model explanations provide initial insights into how different architectures process humor. Our results identify promising trends and current limitations, suggesting that an effective understanding of visual humor requires sophisticated architectures capable of detecting subtle contextual features and bridging the gap between visual perception and abstract reasoning. All the code and data are available here: hrefhttps://github.com/kreimanlab/HumorDBhttps://github.com/kreimanlab/HumorDB