Open Access

ARTICLE

Low-Rank Adapter Layers and Bidirectional Gated Feature Fusion for Multimodal Hateful Memes Classification

Youwei Huang, Han Zhong^*, Cheng Cheng, Yijie Peng

College of Information and Cyber Security, People’s Public Security University of China, Beijing, 100038, China

* Corresponding Author: Han Zhong. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2025, 84(1), 1863-1882. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2025.064734

Received 22 February 2025; Accepted 25 April 2025; Issue published 09 June 2025

Abstract

Hateful meme is a multimodal medium that combines images and texts. The potential hate content of hateful memes has caused serious problems for social media security. The current hateful memes classification task faces significant data scarcity challenges, and direct fine-tuning of large-scale pre-trained models often leads to severe overfitting issues. In addition, it is a challenge to understand the underlying relationship between text and images in the hateful memes. To address these issues, we propose a multimodal hateful memes classification model named LABF, which is based on low-rank adapter layers and bidirectional gated feature fusion. Firstly, low-rank adapter layers are adopted to learn the feature representation of the new dataset. This is achieved by introducing a small number of additional parameters while retaining prior knowledge of the CLIP model, which effectively alleviates the overfitting phenomenon. Secondly, a bidirectional gated feature fusion mechanism is designed to dynamically adjust the interaction weights of text and image features to achieve finer cross-modal fusion. Experimental results show that the method significantly outperforms existing methods on two public datasets, verifying its effectiveness and robustness.

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Keywords

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