Humor Explanation Generation

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Latest papers

8 papers0 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Comedic Fool's Gold: Reward Exploits and Countermeasures in Conversational Humor
Sep 18, 2026Sam LarsonHumor Explanation Generation Reward Hacking
Pebble ML
Computational Humor with Multimodal LLMs: Methods, Datasets, Evaluation, and Challenges
Jul 21, 2026Tuo Liang, Zhe Hu, Disheng Liu +2Multimodal Large Language Models Computational Creativity
Case Western Reserve University · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
RAGthoven at SemEval-2026 Task 1: A Multi-Stage Pipeline Walks Into a Benchmark and Barely Clears the Bar
Jul 14, 2026Marek Šuppa, Viktória Ondrejová, Lucia Ganajová +2LLM Prompting Controllable Text Generation
Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia · Cisco Systems · NaiveNeuron +1
Re-defining Humor Data Objects for AI Humor Research
May 24, 2026Anna Arnett, Bang Nguyen, Meng JiangLLM Prompting Humor Explanation Generation
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame
lmfaoooo at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Humor Is an Audience. Preference Modeling for Constrained Humor Generation
Apr 14, 2026Alexey Tikhonov, Alexey IvanovHumor Explanation Generation Text Generation
Inworld.AI Berlin, Germany · OpenAI Mountain View, CA
HumorRank: A Tournament-Based Leaderboard for Evaluating Humor Generation in Large Language Models
Mar 31, 2026Edward Ajayi, Prasenjit MitraHumor Explanation Generation LLM Evaluation
Carnegie Mellon University Africa Kigali, Rwanda
HumorGen: Cognitive Synergy for Humor Generation in Large Language Models via Persona-Based Distillation
Mar 19, 2026Edward Ajayi, Prasenjit MitraHumor Explanation Generation Text Generation
Carnegie Mellon University Africa
Multi-Agent Comedy Club: Investigating Community Discussion Effects on LLM Humor Generation
Feb 16, 2026Shiwei Hong, Lingyao Li, Ethan Z. Rong +2Humor Explanation Generation Text Generation
George Mason University · University of South Florida · University of Toronto

Sep 18, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

Comedic Fool's Gold: Reward Exploits and Countermeasures in Conversational Humor

Sam Larson

Pebble ML

Humor Explanation Generation Reward Hacking Reward Modeling Text Generation RL for Language Models

Open paper AskPDF arXiv

We investigate automated rewards for training language models in conversational humor, focusing on reward exploits and countermeasures. Two approaches aim to capture understandable surprise and predicted audience amusement. Controlled tests show that an embedding-based surprise reward accepts word-shuffled replies as readily as witty ones. A fluency filter detects the shuffles, but the combined reward also rejects some witty replies and fails further validation. An audience model's predicted laughter is instead vulnerable to laughter cues in either speaker's messages. Normalizing these cues across speakers blocks the covered attacks, although unmatched expressions remain exploitable. Three reinforcement-learning runs evaluate training with successive reward revisions. The final run improves the combined evaluation score by 0.0903 and reduces zero-score sessions by 40%, but its humor-specific improvement remains below our preregistered target. These findings illustrate a broader challenge for automated reward design: countermeasures must block exploitable shortcuts while preserving the behavior the reward was intended to encourage.