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The ever-evolving social media discourse has witnessed an overwhelming use of memes to express opinions or dissent. Besides being misused for spreading malcontent, they are mined by corporations and political parties to glean the public's opinion. Therefore, memes predominantly offer affect-enriched insights towards ascertaining the societal psyche. However, the current approaches are yet to model the affective dimensions expressed in memes effectively. They rely extensively on large multimodal datasets for pre-training and do not generalize well due to constrained visual-linguistic grounding. In this paper, we introduce MOOD (Meme emOtiOns Dataset), which embodies six basic emotions. We then present ALFRED (emotion-Aware muLtimodal Fusion foR Emotion Detection), a novel multimodal neural framework that (i) explicitly models emotion-enriched visual cues, and (ii) employs an efficient cross-modal fusion via a gating mechanism. Our investigation establishes ALFRED's superiority over existing baselines by 4.94% F1. Additionally, ALFRED competes strongly with previous best approaches on the challenging Memotion task. We then discuss ALFRED's domain-agnostic generalizability by demonstrating its dominance on two recently-released datasets – HarMeme and Dank Memes, over other baselines. Further, we analyze ALFRED's interpretability using attention maps. Finally, we highlight the inherent challenges posed by the complex interplay of disparate modality-specific cues toward meme analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we reliably transfer affect models trained in controlled laboratory conditions (in-vitro) to uncontrolled real-world settings (in-vivo)? The information gap between in-vitro and in-vivo applications defines a core challenge of affective computing. This gap is caused by limitations related to affect sensing including intrusiveness, hardware malfunctions and availability of sensors. As a response to these limitations, we introduce the concept of privileged information for operating affect models in real-world scenarios (in the wild). Privileged information enables affect models to be trained across multiple modalities available in a lab, and ignore, without significant performance drops, those modalities that are not available when they operate in the wild. Our approach is tested in two multimodal affect databases one of which is designed for testing models of affect in the wild. By training our affect models using all modalities and then using solely raw footage frames for testing the models, we reach the performance of models that fuse all available modalities for both training and testing. The results are robust across both classification and regression affect modeling tasks which are dominant paradigms in affective computing. Our findings make a decisive step towards realizing affect interaction in the wild. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]