"I See What You Did There": Can Large Vision-Language Models Understand Multimodal Puns?
Puns are a common form of rhetorical wordplay that exploits polysemy and phonetic similarity to create humor. In multimodal puns, visual and textual elements synergize to ground the literal sense and evoke the figurative meaning simultaneously. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are widely used in multimodal understanding and generation, their ability to understand puns has not been systematically studied due to a scarcity of rigorous benchmarks. To address this, we first propose a multimodal pun generation pipeline. We then introduce MultiPun, a dataset comprising diverse types of puns alongside adversarial non-pun distractors. Our evaluation reveals that most models struggle to dist...
| Authors | Naen Xu, Jiayi Sheng, Changjiang Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 7 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 April 2026 |
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