IRON-Meme benchmark released for structured understanding of identities and roles in political memes
The authors introduce IRON-Meme, a human-annotated benchmark of 1,110 political memes built on a social-science grounded framework that labels social identities, viewpoints (ingroup/outgroup), and narrative roles (moral character, intelligence, status, power). They evaluate nine vision-language models, find frontier-scale and reasoning models score highest, note poorer accuracy on infrequent labels, and report that adding template background knowledge does not improve narrative role classification; the dataset and code are publicly released.