# MuVaC: A Variational Causal Framework for Multimodal Sarcasm Understanding in Dialogues

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20451/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [Towards Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (An _Obviously_ Perfect Paper)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01815/) (2019)
- [Causal Attention for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03493/) (2021)
- [Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor "Understanding" Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06293/) (2022)
- [LLM-based Agents Suffer from Hallucinations: A Survey of Taxonomy, Methods, and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18970/) (2025)
- [Reasoning with Sarcasm by Reading In-between](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02856/) (2018)
- [When did you become so smart, oh wise one?! Sarcasm Explanation in Multi-modal Multi-party Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06419/) (2022)
- [Nice perfume. How long did you marinate in it? Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04873/) (2021)
- [Multi-source Semantic Graph-based Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16650/) (2023)
- [Counterfactual Reasoning for Out-of-distribution Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11652/) (2022)
- [CofiPara: A Coarse-to-fine Paradigm for Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00390/) (2024)
- [Sarcasm in Sight and Sound: Benchmarking and Expansion to Improve Multimodal Sarcasm Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01430/) (2023)
- [Explaining (Sarcastic) Utterances to Enhance Affect Understanding in Multimodal Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11049/) (2022)
- [Sentiment-enhanced Graph-based Sarcasm Explanation in Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03658/) (2024)
- [FiLMing Multimodal Sarcasm Detection with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00416/) (2021)
- [VyAnG-Net: A Novel Multi-Modal Sarcasm Recognition Model by Uncovering Visual, Acoustic and Glossary Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10246/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The prevalence of sarcasm in multimodal dialogues on the social platforms presents a crucial yet challenging task for understanding the true intent behind online content. Comprehensive sarcasm analysis requires two key aspects: Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (MSD) and Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation (MuSE). Intuitively, the act of detection is the result of the reasoning process that explains the sarcasm. Current research predominantly focuses on addressing either MSD or MuSE as a single task. Even though some recent work has attempted to integrate these tasks, their inherent causal dependency is often overlooked. To bridge this gap, we propose MuVaC, a variational causal inference framework that mimics human cognitive mechanisms for understanding sarcasm, enabling robust multimodal feature learning to jointly optimize MSD and MuSE. Specifically, we first model MSD and MuSE from the perspective of structural causal models, establishing variational causal pathways to define the objectives for joint optimization. Next, we design an alignment-then-fusion approach to integrate multimodal features, providing robust fusion representations for sarcasm detection and explanation generation. Finally, we enhance the reasoning trustworthiness by ensuring consistency between detection results and explanations. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MuVaC in public datasets, offering a new perspective for understanding multimodal sarcasm.