cs.CVcs.AIcs.CLEmpirical
HCIG: A Hierarchical Cross-Modal Incongruity Graph Network for Multimodal Sarcasm and Cyberbullying Detection
Jul 17, 2026
This paper proposes HCIG and GCCN, two novel frameworks for multimodal sarcasm and cyberbullying detection using hierarchical cross-modal incongruity modeling and graph-based reasoning.
Introduced HCIG and GCCN, which model cross-modal incongruity hierarchically and perform graph-based reasoning, respectively.
Keywords
Before reading this…
Applications
To understand this paper, make sure you know these concepts first:
Multimodal sarcasm and cyberbullying detection remain challenging because the intended meaning often emerges from incongruity between textual and visual information rather than from either modality alone. Existing multimodal approaches primarily rely on feature fusion or cross-modal attention, which may not effectively capture hierarchical semantic inconsistencies across different levels of representation. To address this limitation, this paper proposes HCIG (Hierarchical Cross-modal Incongruity Graph Network), a novel framework that models cross-modal incongruity at token, phrase, and global levels using graph attention networks and adaptively integrates these representations through a learned hierarchical attention mechanism. As a complementary architecture, we also introduce GCCN (Graph-based Cross-modal Contradiction Network), which performs graph-based reasoning using contradiction-aware pooling for efficient multimodal interaction learning. The proposed models are evaluated on the MMSD sarcasm benchmark and the MultiBully cyberbullying dataset, together with comprehensive ablation studies and cross-task transfer experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that HCIG achieves the best performance on MMSD with 85.74% accuracy and 85.29% macro-F1, while GCCN attains the highest macro-F1 (68.66%) on MultiBully and HCIG achieves the highest accuracy (69.62%) and bullying-class F1 (74.90%). The findings demonstrate that hierarchical multi-granularity incongruity modeling provides more effective multimodal reasoning than conventional fusion strategies, offering a robust framework for sarcasm and cyberbullying detection in social media.