Paper Detail

Reading Between the Frames: Interpreting Implicit and Non-literal Meaning in Social Media Videos

Yang Wang, Yanan Ma, Yiqi Liu, Zi Yan Chang, Chi-Li Chen, Chia-Yi Hsiao, Tyler Loakman, Aline Villavicencio, Chenghao Xiao, Chenghua Lin

arxiv Score 18.2

Published 2026-08-05 · First seen 2026-08-06

General AI

Abstract

Social media videos often communicate meanings that go beyond their visible actions, captions, or speech. A mundane clip may become humorous, ironic, or satire only through the interaction of multimodal cues and cultural context, making such content a difficult test case for video-language models. In this paper, we introduce \textit{DrivelHub+}, a benchmark for evaluating whether models can infer the implicit, non-linear, and rhetorically layered meanings of social media videos that appear nonsensical on the surface but convey deliberate pragmatic meanings. DrivelHub+ consists of 1,000 videos collected from social media, each annotated with a human-written implicit narrative explanation. Unlike conventional video understanding tasks focused on recognition or description, we present a benchmark that targets contextual multimodal reasoning. We evaluate current video-language models from two perspectives: explanation, where models must explain the pragmatic comprehension of a video in natural language; and representation, where we adapt reasoning-as-retrieval to test whether model representations align videos with their corresponding implicit narratives in both video-to-text and text-to-video retrieval. Our benchmark provides a diagnostic setting for measuring the gap between multimodal perception and pragmatic comprehension, asking whether current models can move beyond describing what is shown to inferring what is meant.

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BibTeX

@article{wang2026reading,
  title = {Reading Between the Frames: Interpreting Implicit and Non-literal Meaning in Social Media Videos},
  author = {Yang Wang and Yanan Ma and Yiqi Liu and Zi Yan Chang and Chi-Li Chen and Chia-Yi Hsiao and Tyler Loakman and Aline Villavicencio and Chenghao Xiao and Chenghua Lin},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Social media videos often communicate meanings that go beyond their visible actions, captions, or speech. A mundane clip may become humorous, ironic, or satire only through the interaction of multimodal cues and cultural context, making such content a difficult test case for video-language models. In this paper, we introduce \textbackslash{}textit\{DrivelHub+\}, a benchmark for evaluating whether models can infer the implicit, non-linear, and rhetorically layered meanings of social media videos that appear nonse},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04939},
  keywords = {cs.CL},
  eprint = {2608.04939},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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