AINeutralarXiv – CS AI · 6h ago6/10
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FBHM: Functional Benchmarking and Steering of VLMs for Hateful Meme Detection
Researchers introduce FBHM, a systematically curated benchmark for evaluating vision-language models on hateful meme detection across 25 rhetorical functionalities and 10 target communities. The study reveals that state-of-the-art VLMs exhibit severe generalization failures, dropping from high accuracy on standard datasets to near-random performance on FBHM, indicating they rely on dataset-specific shortcuts rather than robust multimodal reasoning. The proposed LSV (learnable steering vectors) method achieves ~30 Macro-F1 point improvements using minimal training data without degrading source-domain performance.