Cross-Cultural Misogynistic Meme Detection Grand Challenge (CC-MMD) 2026-ICMI 2026-reg

[Bharathi Raja Asoka Chakravarthi]

Cross-Cultural Misogynistic Meme Detection Grand Challenge (CC-MMD) 2026

Held in conjunction with the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2026) Napoli, Italy | October 5–9, 2026

Website link : https://sites.google.com/view/cc-mmd2026/overview

Codabench link: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/14187/

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Online misogyny is increasingly evolving into complex multimodal formats. Memes—the fusion of text and imagery—often leverage humor, irony, and cultural shorthand to mask harmful ideologies. However, what is perceived as misogynistic is rarely universal; it is deeply rooted in local norms, language nuances, and social symbolism.

The CC-MMD Grand Challenge benchmarks the next generation of culturally robust multimodal systems. We focus on binary misogyny classification across three distinct regions: Indian, Chinese, and Western (English) contexts. This challenge moves beyond single-pool testing to evaluate how well AI generalizes across specific cultural partitions, ensuring that moderation systems are inclusive and reliable for a global digital population.

Participants are invited to develop multimodal models that can navigate:

• Implicit Meaning: Detecting harm when neither the text nor the image is explicitly toxic in isolation.
• Cultural Grounding: Interpreting symbols and slang unique to Indian, Chinese, and Western contexts.

Task & Data

• Task: Binary classification (Misogynistic vs. Non-Misogynistic) of multimodal memes.
• Dataset: A systematic, cross-culturally annotated dataset featuring multilingual text and diverse imagery.
• Platform: Competition hosting and data release will be managed via CodaBench https://www.codabench.org/competitions/14187/.

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Important Dates

Task Announcement

February 27, 2026

Release of Training Data

February 27, 2026

Release of Test Data

April 1, 2026

Run Submission Deadline

April 20, 2026

Results Declared

May 5, 2026

Paper Submission Deadline

June 10, 2026

Peer Review Notification

July 8, 2026

Camera-ready Paper Due

July 23, 2026