what makes meme understanding difficult

Memes are compact, but their meaning is rarely contained in the image alone. A model often needs the caption, the visual context, cultural background, and the implied surface message before it can explain what is going on.

That is why MemeInterpret adds more than labels. The dataset work connects meme captions with surface messages and relevant background knowledge so that models can be evaluated on interpretation, not only classification.

For me, the interesting part is the gap between what is visible and what must be inferred. That gap shows up in many multimodal tasks, but memes make it especially clear.