MemeMind: Reference-Guided Trace Construction for Offline Context Optimization

Offline context optimization improves an agent by revising its instructions and examples while keeping the model frozen. This approach learns from rollouts on an adaptation set, but some queries produce only failed rollouts. In these cases, the optimizer sees no successful example of how the available tools can reach the correct answer. We introduce MemeMind, which uses an offline reference answer to recover this missing experience. TraceBuilder identifies the evidence required by the reference, executes text search, image retrieval, and visual grounding, and verifies the resulting tool trace before adding it to the adaptation buffer. ToolGuide then summarizes the collected traces into a shared guide and separate instructions for each tool. The reference answers and constructed traces are used only during adaptation, while inference uses the learned guides with a frozen model. We study this problem through Anime, Comic, and Game meme interpretation. These memes combine edited and ambiguous visual content, overlaid text, long tail franchise knowledge, and culture specific references. Their interpretation can require coordinated visual grounding, image retrieval, and text search, making them a demanding setting in which native rollout groups may fail together. We evaluate MemeMind on MemeX, a benchmark of 1,000 such memes annotated by experts. Across two Qwen3-VL models, two language partitions, and two independent judges, MemeMind improves over the strongest context optimization baseline by 22.0% and 21.1% on Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B, and by 8.1% and 8.0% on Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B under GPT-5 judging. Ablations and held out traces show that constructing successful tool use for failed groups provides the largest component gain and produces more effective evidence acquisition at inference time.

MemeBench: What LVLMs Miss When Interpreting Culture-Dependent Memes

Large vision-language models have improved at describing visual content, but accurate descriptions do not ensure interpretation when meaning depends on knowledge beyond the pixels. Memes expose this gap because they rely on cultural entities, background knowledge, and community conventions. Most meme benchmarks reduce interpretation to labels or holistic scores, obscuring where an explanation breaks down. We introduce MemeBench, a diagnostic benchmark of 1,253 Chinese and English memes with human-written references and quality-controlled VIKR annotations, centered on anime, comics, games, and adjacent online subcultures. Its VIKR schema decomposes explanations into Visual clues, Identity links, Knowledge units, and Reasoning mechanisms. Across 26 LVLMs, every model covers visible content more reliably than the knowledge needed to interpret it, and even the strongest retains a 22.6% Visual-Knowledge gap. To test whether this diagnosis can guide improvement, we introduce KAR, an entity-guided retrieval baseline built on CultureBase. Across four controlled models, KAR raises VIKR Success by 3.6-7.4% and, compared with generic retrieval, repairs more answers and breaks fewer. Yet both retrieval conditions improve Identity and Knowledge while reducing Visual coverage in every comparison. MemeBench reveals whether an interpretation succeeds, what is missing, and whether targeted evidence fills the diagnosed gap.