Tackling Model Bias via Game-theoretic Multi-agent Collaboration Framework for Hateful Meme Classification

Yiwei Wei, Zhengliang Guo, Shaozu Yuan, Chengyin Hu, Zhiyang Jia, Jiujiang Guo, Meng Chen, Peiying Wang, Longbiao Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 22143-22152

Hateful meme classification aims to identify memes containing hateful content and has become increasingly important in the era of social media dominance. Large multimodal models (LMMs) have significantly enhanced the understanding of multimodal content, advancing this field. However, cognitive biases in LMMs can impede effective collaboration among models. To address this issue, we introduce GECO, a Game-theoretic multi-agEnt Collaboration framewOrk that organizes multiple LMMs into interacting agents and employs game-theoretic principles to guide them toward an optimal cooperative equilibrium. GECO integrates a mixed bonus scheme, incorporating both individual accuracy and cross-model agreement to promote convergence toward a consistent cooperative solution. In addition, we implement efficient policy learning and introduce a penalty coefficient to optimize the framework effectively and ensure training stability. Extensive experiments on five publicly available benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance.