Yes FLoReNce, I Will Do Better Next Time! Agentic Feedback Reasoning for Humorous Meme Detection

Read full text
Authors: Olivia Shanhong Liu, Pai Chet Ng, De Wen Soh, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Humorous memes blend visual and textual cues to convey irony, satire, or social commentary, posing unique challenges for AI systems that must interpret intent rather than surface correlations. Existing multimodal or prompting-based models generate explanations for humor but operate in an open loop,lacking the ability to critique or refine their reasoning once a prediction is made. We propose FLoReNce, an agentic feedback reasoning framework that treats meme understanding as a closed-loop process during learning and an open-loop process during inference. In the closed loop, a reasoning agent is critiqued by a judge; the error and semantic feedback are converted into control signals and stored in a feedback-informed, non-parametric knowledge base. At inference, the model retrieves similar judged experiences from this KB and uses them to modulate its prompt, enabling better, self-aligned reasoning without finetuning. On the PrideMM dataset, FLoReNce improves both predictive performance and explanation quality over static multimodal baselines, showing that feedback-regulated prompting is a viable path to adaptive meme humor understanding.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Humor Studies and Applications Multimodal Machine Learning Applications Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
12 January 2026
Document type
Preprint