Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs) present a promising framework for neuro-symbolic reasoning, combining end-to-end differentiability with the interpretability of symbolic logic programming. However, optimizing NTPs remains a significant challenge due to their complex objective landscape and gradient sparcity. On the other hand, Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) methods offer smooth optimization with well-defined learning objectives but often lack interpretability. In this work, we propose several strategies to integrate the strengths of NTPs and KGEs, and demonstrate substantial improvements in both accuracy and computational efficiency. Specifically, we show that by leveraging the strength of structural learning in KGEs, we can greatly improve NTPs’ poorly structured embedding space, while by substituting NTPs with efficient KGE operations, we can significantly reduce evaluation time by over 1000$\times$ on large-scale dataset such as WN18RR with a mild accuracy trade-off.

Memes are widely used to convey cultural and societal issues and have a significant impact on public opinion. However, little work has been done on understanding and explaining the semantics expressed in multimodal memes. To fill this research gap, we introduce MERMAID, a dataset consisting of 3,633 memes annotated with their entities and relations, and propose a novel MERF pipeline that extracts entities and their relationships in memes. Our framework combines state-of-the-art techniques from natural language processing and computer vision to extract text and image features and infer relationships between entities in memes. We evaluate the proposed framework on a real-world meme dataset and establish the benchmark for the new multimodal meme semantic understanding task. Our evaluation also includes a low-resource setting, where we assess the applicability of our framework to low-resource settings, which is a common problem due to the high cost and lack of labeled data for relations in memes. Overall, our work contributes to the understanding of the semantics of memes, a crucial form of communication in today’s society.

Hateful meme detection is a challenging multimodal task that requires comprehension of both vision and language, as well as cross-modal interactions. Recent studies have tried to fine-tune pre-trained vision-language models (PVLMs) for this task. However, with increasing model sizes, it becomes important to leverage powerful PVLMs more efficiently, rather than simply fine-tuning them. Recently, researchers have attempted to convert meme images into textual captions and prompt language models for predictions. This approach has shown good performance but suffers from non-informative image captions. Considering the two factors mentioned above, we propose a probing-based captioning approach to leverage PVLMs in a zero-shot visual question answering (VQA) manner. Specifically, we prompt a frozen PVLM by asking hateful content-related questions and use the answers as image captions (which we call Pro-Cap), so that the captions contain information critical for hateful content detection. The good performance of models with Pro-Cap on three benchmarks validates the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method1.