Learning to Think Like a Cartoon Captionist: Incongruity-Resolution Supervision for Multimodal Humor Understanding — Paper

Abstract

-cross Abstract: Humor is one of the few cognitive tasks where getting the reasoning right matters as much as getting the answer right. While recent work evaluates humor understanding on benchmarks such as the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest (NYCC), it largely treats it as black-box prediction, overlooking the structured reasoning processes underlying humor comprehension. We introduce IRS (Incongruity-Resolution Supervision), a framework that decomposes humor understanding into three components: Incongruity Modeling, which identifies mismatches in the visual scene; Resolution Modeling, which constructs coherent reinterpretations of these mismatches; and Preference Alignment, which evaluates candidate interpretations under human judgments. Grounded in incongruity-resolution theory and expert captionist practice, IRS supervises intermediate reasoning process through structured traces that make the path from visual perception to humorous interpretation explicit and learnable. Across 7B, 32B, and 72B models on NYCC, IRS improves performance across caption matching and ranking, with IRS-72B achieving the strongest model performance on ranking (76.10%), surpassing both non-expert human performance and all evaluated open- and closed-source multimodal baselines. Zero-shot transfer further shows that IRS learns generalizable reasoning patterns.

Authors 7

Hatice Merve Vural, Doga Kukul, Ege Erdem Ozlu, Demir Ekin Arikan, Bob Mankoff, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2604.15210
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 8 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: replace
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 8 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2604.15210
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 8 h agohigh
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 8 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2604.15210
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 8 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.AI
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 8 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 8 h agohigh

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Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

8 h ago

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None

No models linked to this paper yet.

Authors: Hatice Merve Vural, Doga Kukul, Ege Erdem Ozlu

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Claim history

9 claims · 9 properties

Official pageofficial_url1

Claim history for Official page
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15210	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Abstractabstract1

Claim history for Abstract
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
-cross Abstract: Humor is one of the few cognitive tasks where getting the reasoning right matters as much as getting the answer right. While recent work evaluates humor understanding on benchmarks such as the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest (NYCC), it largely treats it as black-box prediction, overlooking the structured reasoning processes underlying humor comprehension. We introduce IRS (Incongruity-Resolution Supervision), a framework that decomposes humor understanding into three components: Incongruity Modeling, which identifies mismatches in the visual scene; Resolution Modeling, which constructs coherent reinterpretations of these mismatches; and Preference Alignment, which evaluates candidate interpretations under human judgments. Grounded in incongruity-resolution theory and expert captionist practice, IRS supervises intermediate reasoning process through structured traces that make the path from visual perception to humorous interpretation explicit and learnable. Across 7B, 32B, and 72B models on NYCC, IRS improves performance across caption matching and ranking, with IRS-72B achieving the strongest model performance on ranking (76.10%), surpassing both non-expert human performance and all evaluated open- and closed-source multimodal baselines. Zero-shot transfer further shows that IRS learns generalizable reasoning patterns.	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Arxiv announce typearxiv_announce_type1

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replace	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

arXiv idarxiv_id1

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Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
2604.15210	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Authorsauthors1

Claim history for Authors
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
Hatice Merve Vural, Doga Kukul, Ege Erdem Ozlu, Demir Ekin Arikan, Bob Mankoff, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Categoriescategories1

Claim history for Categories
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cs.AI, cs.CL	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

PDFpdf_url1

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.15210	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Primary categoryprimary_category1

Claim history for Primary category
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cs.AI	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Publishedpublished_at1

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Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
11 Sept 2026	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperLearning to Think Like a Cartoon Captionist: Incongruity-Resolution Supervision for Multimodal Humor Understanding
New paper: Learning to Think Like a Cartoon Captionist: Incongruity-Resolution Supervision for Multimodal Humor Understanding
arxiv
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Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CL	feed	T1· Official	6 h ago	1

Tier 1 = official/primary, 2 = quality secondary, 3 = community, 4 = unverified. Every snapshot is archived; see all sources and the methodology.