  Moderation of social media content is currently a highly manual task, yet
there is too much content posted daily to do so effectively. With the advent of
a number of multimodal models, there is the potential to reduce the amount of
manual labor for this task. In this work, we aim to explore different models
and determine what is most effective for the Hateful Memes Challenge, a
challenge by Meta designed to further machine learning research in content
moderation. Specifically, we explore the differences between early fusion and
late fusion models in classifying multimodal memes containing text and images.
We first implement a baseline using unimodal models for text and images
separately using BERT and ResNet-152, respectively. The outputs from these
unimodal models were then concatenated together to create a late fusion model.
In terms of early fusion models, we implement ConcatBERT, VisualBERT, ViLT,
CLIP, and BridgeTower. It was found that late fusion performed significantly
worse than early fusion models, with the best performing model being CLIP which
achieved an AUROC of 70.06. The code for this work is available at
https://github.com/bzhao18/CS-7643-Project.
