lmfaoooo at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Humor Is an Audience. Preference Modeling for Constrained Humor Generation

Evaluating humor in large language models (LLMs) is an open challenge because existing approaches yield isolated, incomparable metrics rather than unified model rankings, making it difficult to track progress across systems. We introduce HumorRank, a tournament-based evaluation framework and leaderboard for textual humor generation. On two public benchmarks (SemEval-2026 MWAHAHA and Humor Transfer Bench), we conduct extensive automated pairwise evaluation across nine models spanning proprietary, open-weight, and specialized systems. Pairwise judgments are produced by LLM judges grounded in the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH): each judge integrates structured comedic analysis into adjudication, jointly yielding a preference decision, an interpretable rationale, and mechanism, delivery, and failure tags rather than a black-box funniness score. Judgments are aggregated via an Adaptive Swiss tournament, with Bradley-Terry Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) producing globally consistent humor generation capability rankings. Rankings are cross-judge stable: independent LLM judges (Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen 2.5 72B) yield Kendall tau = 0.889 on both benchmarks, and a human calibration study shows human-LLM agreement tracking human-human agreement on hard funny-versus-funny pairs. Our results demonstrate that HumorRank yields statistically grounded model stratifications, showing that humor quality is associated with mastery of comedic mechanisms such as incongruity, conciseness, escalation, and absurdity rather than model scale alone, with specialized fine-tuned models reaching parity with far larger systems. HumorRank thus provides a scalable, interpretable, and reproducible methodology for benchmarking and understanding LLM-generated humor.

Humor generation poses a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), because their standard training objective (next-token prediction) inherently conflicts with the surprise and incongruity required for comedy. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Cognitive Synergy Framework, a methodology for generating highquality humor data inspired by psychological theories of humor. Utilizing a Mixtureof-Thought (MoT) approach, we deploy six cognitive personas (e.g., The Absurdist, The Cynic) to synthesize diverse comedic perspectives for a given prompt. This framework produces a theory-grounded dataset, which we use to fine-tune a 7B-parameter student model. We further evaluate two alignment strategies, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and an offline group-relative variant O-GRPO, finding that neither improves over SFT. However, our 7B HumorGen model variants significantly outperform larger instruction-tuned baselines and achieve top-tier open-weight performance while remaining competitive with frontier proprietary systems. These results suggest that cognitively driven data curation is more critical than alignment algorithms or model scale for humor generation.

We present RAGthoven, our system for SemEval-2026 Task 1 (MWAHAHA), Subtask A (multilingual constrained humor generation in English, Spanish, and Chinese). RAGthoven decomposes creative text generation into a multi-stage large language model (LLM) pipeline (Planner, Best-of-N Writer, Reflector for self-critique, LLM-as-a-judge Judge) grounded in computational humor theory (Benign Violation Theory, Script-based Semantic Theory of Humor) and refined across ten experiments. In our final configuration, we augment the Planner with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) from a curated joke corpus, seeding generation with diverse joke mechanisms. We also evaluate two agentic variants -- ReAct-style sequential tool-calling (Exp09) and autonomous multi-branch orchestration (Exp10) -- that expose the same four stages with a deterministic ConstraintAudit checker. Across four frontier models on a held-out 12-instance English sample, neither agentic variant produced outputs we judged superior to the non-agentic pipeline despite substantially higher tool-call budgets. RAGthoven shares Rank 1 with the Gemini 2.5 Flash baseline in all three languages, with overlapping organizer-reported confidence intervals. In Spanish, it leads the baseline by 42 raw Elo points (1182 vs. 1140), while in English (1045 vs. 1081) and Chinese (1045 vs. 1053) the baseline holds the higher raw rating within the same statistical tie. Together, these results suggest language-dependent diminishing returns from elaborate multi-stage prompt engineering and agentic scaffolding once a strong frontier model is in the loop.