# HumorDB: Can AI understand graphical humor?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13564 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13564/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 13 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [UR-FUNNY: A Multimodal Language Dataset for Understanding Humor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06618/) (2019)
- [Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor "Understanding" Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06293/) (2022)
- [We Are Humor Beings: Understanding and Predicting Visual Humor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04407/) (2015)
- [M2H2: A Multimodal Multiparty Hindi Dataset For Humor Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01260/) (2021)
- [Dutch Humor Detection by Generating Negative Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13652/) (2020)
- [Can Deep Learning Recognize Subtle Human Activities?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13852/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [When 'YES' Meets 'BUT': Can Large Models Comprehend Contradictory Humor Through Comparative Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23137/) (2025)
- [Harm or Humor: A Multimodal, Multilingual Benchmark for Overt and Covert Harmful Humor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17759/) (2026)
- [Learning to Think Like a Cartoon Captionist: Incongruity-Resolution Supervision for Multimodal Humor Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15210/) (2026)
- [Culture-Aware Humorous Captioning: Multimodal Humor Generation across Cultural Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18091/) (2026)
- [Computational Humor with Multimodal LLMs: Methods, Datasets, Evaluation, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19011/) (2026)
- [Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24082/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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