Hateful Memes Detection Based on Multi-Task Learning

Abstract

With the popularity of posting memes on social platforms, the severe negative impact of hateful memes is growing. As existing detection models have lower detection accuracy than humans, hateful memes detection is still a challenge to statistical learning and artificial intelligence. This paper proposed a multi-task learning method consisting of a primary multimodal task and two unimodal auxiliary tasks to address this issue. We introduced a self-supervised generation strategy in auxiliary tasks to generate unimodal auxiliary labels automatically. Meanwhile, we used BERT and RESNET as the backbone for text and image classification, respectively, and then fusion them with a late fusion method. In the training phase, the backward guidance technique and the adaptive weight adjustment strategy were used to capture the consistency and variability between different modalities, numerically improving the hateful memes detection accuracy and the generalization and robustness of the model. The experiment conducted on the Facebook AI multimodal hateful memes dataset shows that the prediction accuracy of our model outperformed the comparing models.