# MemeBLIP2: A novel lightweight multimodal system to detect harmful memes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21226 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21226/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04790/) (2020)
- [MOMENTA: A Multimodal Framework for Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05184/) (2021)
- [MemeCLIP: Leveraging CLIP Representations for Multimodal Meme Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14703/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [From Points to Coalitions: Hierarchical Contrastive Shapley Values for Prioritizing Data Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19363/) (2025)
- [Cloud-Based AI Systems: Leveraging Large Language Models for Intelligent Fault Detection and Autonomous Self-Healing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11743/) (2025)
- [Does Bigger Mean Better? Comparitive Analysis of CNNs and Biomedical Vision Language Modles in Medical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00411/) (2025)
- [Rainbow Noise: Stress-Testing Multimodal Harmful-Meme Detectors on LGBTQ Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19551/) (2025)
- [Renaissance of RNNs in Streaming Clinical Time Series: Compact Recurrence Remains Competitive with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16677/) (2025)
- [Lightweight Baselines for Medical Abstract Classification: DistilBERT with Cross-Entropy as a Strong Default](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10025/) (2025)
- [Physiologically Informed Deep Learning: A Multi-Scale Framework for Next-Generation PBPK Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18472/) (2026)
- [Beyond Accuracy: A Qualitative Analysis of Vision-Language Models for Hate Speech Detection in Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26143/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Memes often merge visuals with brief text to share humor or opinions, yet some memes contain harmful messages such as hate speech. In this paper, we introduces MemeBLIP2, a light weight multimodal system that detects harmful memes by combining image and text features effectively. We build on previous studies by adding modules that align image and text representations into a shared space and fuse them for better classification. Using BLIP-2 as the core vision-language model, our system is evaluated on the PrideMM datasets. The results show that MemeBLIP2 can capture subtle cues in both modalities, even in cases with ironic or culturally specific content, thereby improving the detection of harmful material.