# An Adaptive Supervised Contrastive Learning Framework for Implicit Sexism Detection in Digital Social Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05271 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05271/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
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- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.6297/) (2013)
- [Deep Learning for Hate Speech Detection in Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00188/) (2017)
- [Multi-label Categorization of Accounts of Sexism using a Neural Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04602/) (2019)
- [An Explainable Contrastive-based Dilated Convolutional Network with Transformer for Pediatric Pneumonia Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16143/) (2024)
- [User-Aware Multilingual Abusive Content Detection in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21321/) (2024)
- [KisanQRS: A Deep Learning-based Automated Query-Response System for Agricultural Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08883/) (2024)
- [Hate Speech Detection via Dual Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05578/) (2023)
- [A Hybrid Filtering for Micro-video Hashtag Recommendation using Graph-based Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10367/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The global reach of social media has amplified the spread of hateful content, including implicit sexism, which is often overlooked by conventional detection methods. In this work, we introduce an Adaptive Supervised Contrastive lEarning framework for implicit sexism detectioN (ASCEND). A key innovation of our method is the incorporation of threshold-based contrastive learning: by computing cosine similarities between embeddings, we selectively treat only those sample pairs as positive if their similarity exceeds a learnable threshold. This mechanism refines the embedding space by robustly pulling together representations of semantically similar texts while pushing apart dissimilar ones, thus reducing false positives and negatives. The final classification is achieved by jointly optimizing a contrastive loss with a cross-entropy loss. Textual features are enhanced through a word-level attention module. Additionally, we employ sentiment, emotion, and toxicity features. Evaluations on the EXIST2021 and MLSC datasets demonstrate that ASCEND significantly outperforms existing methods, with average Macro F1 improvements of 9.86%, 29.63%, and 32.51% across multiple tasks, highlighting its efficacy in capturing the subtle cues of implicit sexist language.