AI Wizards at EXIST 2026: Hierarchical Soft-Label Learning for Multimodal Sexism Identification in Memes
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: We present the AI Wizards submission to EXIST 2026 for multimodal sexism identification in memes. The task is composed of three, increasingly harder subtasks. We model them hierarchically as conditional soft-label prediction over empirical annotator distributions. Our system maps fixed Gemini Embedding 2 vision-language representations through a lightweight Gated MLP trained with KL divergence and homoscedastic uncertainty weighting. Our submissions ranked first on Task 2.3 and fourth on Tasks 2.1 and 2.2 on the official Soft-Soft leaderboards. The code is available at https://github.com/NLP-AI-Wizards/EXIST-2026
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutions: ETH Zurich, Swiss Data Science Center
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7167635211