Computational Humor with Multimodal LLMs: Methods, Datasets, Evaluation, and Challenges

Tuo Liang, Zhe Hu, Disheng Liu, Jing Li, Yu Yin

Computational Humor with Multimodal LLMs: Methods, Datasets, Evaluation, and Challenges: 3 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #24 of 25 papers on 2026-07-22. Day-by-day upvote history.

Multimodal humor in memes, cartoons, and comics remains difficult for AI systems because intended meaning depends on non-literal mechanisms, shared cultural knowledge, and communicative intent rather than literal scene description. This survey focuses on visual humor understanding in single-image and multi-panel artifacts, while treating humor generation as an emerging downstream frontier. We position the literature against prior humor, sarcasm, and general MLLM surveys and organize it using a capability-centric hierarchy spanning recognition, interpretation and reasoning, and generation. Under this lens, we synthesize benchmark design, evaluation protocols, and modeling paradigms, tracing the field's shift from task-specific fusion models to large-model approaches based on multimodal alignment, evidence-grounded reasoning, and controlled generation. We conclude by highlighting the main barriers to progress: shortcut-prone evaluation, limited cultural and narrative coverage, weak evidence grounding, and unresolved safety and ownership concerns.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

Data: hysts-bot-data/daily-papers-stats and the Daily Papers API. Open data: tardellirs/paper-pulse-data. Sister project: Model Pulse, the download history of every model on the Hub.