MemeLogos: Knowledge-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Harmful Meme Detection

Hexiang Gu, Saihui Hou, Changlan Liu, Min Ren, Huijia Wu +2

With the rapid proliferation of social media, harmful memes have become a growing threat to online ecosystems. Their harmfulness is often implicitly conveyed through complex interactions among visual, textual, and contextual cues, making accurate detection challenging. Recent studies have introduced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and external knowledge into harmful meme detection. However, existing methods mainly retrieve similar instances or auxiliary information, limiting their ability to capture reusable harmfulness knowledge and underlying reasoning mechanisms, and thus constraining both detection performance and interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose MemeLogos, a knowledge-driven retrieval-augmented reasoning framework for harmful meme detection. MemeLogos abstracts recurring harmfulness patterns and reasoning structures from diverse harmful cases into reusable knowledge units and organizes them into a dedicated star-shaped knowledge graph. By combining structured knowledge retrieval with an explicit multi-stage reasoning process inspired by cognitive mechanisms, MemeLogos leverages retrieved knowledge to guide harmfulness reasoning, improving both…