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Multi-Modal-Minds@CHiPSAL 2026: A Comparative Study of Textual, Visual and Multimodal Architecture for Nepali Meme Moderation

Memes have become ubiquitous on social media platforms blending text and imagery to express complex and culturally nuanced messages. While a high degree of automation in meme moderation has been achieved for high-resource languages, low-resource languages, such as Nepali, still remain largely neglected. In this paper, we describe our system submission to the CHiPSAL 2026 Shared Task on Multi-modal Hate and Sentiment Understanding in Low-Resource Nepali Memes, which features two main sub-tasks: (1) Detection of HateSpeech as binary classification and (2) Sentiment Analysis as multi-class classification in Nepali memes. We perform a comprehensive analysis of the following models: uni-modal textual models (mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa,MuRIL), uni-modal visual models (ResNet, ConvNeXt, ViT), nine different late-fusion multimodal models, and the vision-language foundation model, SigLIP. Among all models, the ViT model achieved the best macro F1-score(0.6278) for the hate speech detection task, while SigLIP achieved the best score (0.5481) for the sentiment analysis task. We hypothesize that the under-performance of fusion models may be attributed to OCR noise and inadequate low-resource textual representations that act as a bottleneck when paired with more advanced visual encoders. These results highlight the unique challenges of multimodal meme comprehension in low-resource contexts and underscores the requirement for culturally grounded, noise-robust approaches to content moderation in Nepali.