Idiom-Based Visual Puns

• Idiom-based visual puns are images that fuse literal scene elements with figurative meanings, enabling dual interpretation through explicit cues and cultural symbolism.
• They use a multimodal generative pipeline with iterative prompt refinement, combining LLMs and text-to-image models to reliably reconstruct idiomatic expressions.
• Empirical evaluations on curated datasets reveal human–machine gaps and cultural challenges, guiding ongoing research in multimodal reasoning and creative image synthesis.

An idiom-based visual pun is an image that concurrently encodes the literal and figurative meanings of an idiom, forming a creative intersection of visual semantics and figurative language. This concept formally centers on the principle that, given an idiomatic phrase $I \in \mathcal I$, a correct idiom-based visual pun $x \in \mathcal X$ is one from which a human (or multimodal LLM, MLLM) can reliably infer the original idiom by identifying compositional cues that evoke both its surface and intended senses. Idiom-based visual puns underlie new evaluation paradigms for multimodal understanding, dataset creation, and generative modeling, catalyzing research at the intersection of computer vision, natural language processing, and cultural studies (Xiao et al., 28 Nov 2025, Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024, Chung et al., 1 Oct 2024, Shahmohammadi et al., 2023, Yosef et al., 2023).

1. Formal Characterization and Canonical Properties

Idiom-based visual puns are defined as follows: Let $\mathcal I = \{I_1, \dots, I_n\}$ be a corpus of idioms, $\mathcal P$ the space of text prompts, $\mathcal X$ the space of generated images, and $\mathcal R$ the space of recovered idiom strings. For each idiom $I \in \mathcal I$, assign a literal meaning (surface composition, e.g. "fox in a henhouse": actual fox in the coop) and a figurative meaning (semantic implication, e.g. "a cause of trouble"). An image $x \in \mathcal X$ constitutes a visual pun of $I$ if a human or MLLM can recover $I$ from $x$ by recognizing its compositional features that jointly refer to both the literal and figurative readings (Xiao et al., 28 Nov 2025, Shahmohammadi et al., 2023).

In practice, idiom-based visual puns demand that an image be interpretable in both senses, often requiring the hybridization of explicit scene elements and culturally specific semantic cues. Chinese rebus art expands this definition, leveraging homophony, logographic associations, and visual symbolism to encode idiomatic wishes or aphorisms in layered artwork (Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024).

2. Multimodal Generative Frameworks

A prototypical pipeline for idiom-based visual pun synthesis proceeds iteratively, alternating among three components: LLM for prompt refinement, text-to-image model (T2IM) for image synthesis, and multimodal LLM (MLLM) for idiom inference and prompt adjustment. For a target idiom $I_{\text{input}} \in \mathcal I$, initialize $P_0 = \varepsilon$ (empty prompt) and $U_0 = \varnothing$. For each iteration $t = 1, ..., T$ (with $T$ a step limit, e.g. $T = 5$):

• $$P_t = \mathrm{LLM}_{\mathrm{prompt}}(I_{\text{input}}, P_{t-1}, U_{t-1})$$
• $G_t = \mathrm{T2IM}(P_t)$
• $R_t = \mathrm{MLLM}_{\mathrm{infer}}(G_t)$

If $$\mathrm{canonicalize}(R_t) = \mathrm{canonicalize}(I_{\text{input}})$$, halt; otherwise update the prompt with $$U_t = \mathrm{MLLM}_{\mathrm{update}}(R_t, G_t, I_{\text{input}})$$ and continue (Xiao et al., 28 Nov 2025). This framework supports fully automatic pipeline execution without human annotation, facilitating large-scale dataset generation and evaluation.

ViPE pursues a related approach, distilling figurative comprehension and visual description abilities into lightweight student models (ViPE-S, ViPE-M) via symbolic knowledge distillation from GPT-3.5, leveraging a massive lyric corpus. The pipeline for idiom-based visual pun construction involves generating concise visual elaborations of idioms, composing blended prompts to encode both meanings, and synthesizing output images via established T2IM engines such as Stable Diffusion (Shahmohammadi et al., 2023).

3. Datasets and Annotation Protocols

Several datasets exist specifically to benchmark idiom-based visual puns and culturally embedded visual wordplay:

• Visual Puns from Idioms: 1,000 English idioms with up to 5 iterations per idiom, yielding images, final prompts, and prompt-edit histories fully annotated via MLLMs (Xiao et al., 28 Nov 2025).
• IRFL Idioms Subset: 628 idioms, 6,697 annotated images (Figurative only, Figurative+Literal, Partial Literal, Literal, or None), sourced by querying dictionaries, performing image retrieval, OCR filtering, and structured human annotation (Yosef et al., 2023).
• UNPIE (Understanding Pun with Image Explanations): 1,000 pun sentences with one dual-sense explanation image, two disambiguator images per pun, and translations into three non-English languages, supporting tasks of grounding, disambiguation, and reconstruction (Chung et al., 1 Oct 2024).
• Chinese Pun Rebus Art Dataset: 1,011 images spanning 2,000+ years, annotated with bilingual rebus formulations, key elements, idiomatic meanings, and symbolic-imagery mechanisms, enabling fine-grained cultural decoding (Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024).

Annotation protocol in IRFL integrates multi-stage query construction, image retrieval, automated phrase/definition scoring using ViLT, extensive OCR-based filtering, and five-way Amazon Mechanical Turk labeling with high inter-annotator agreement ($94\%$ of images $\geq 3/5$ consensus) (Yosef et al., 2023). In Chinese rebus art, experts provide category labels and mechanism mapping to facilitate robust annotation and benchmarking (Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024).

4. Evaluation Metrics and Comparative Model Performance

Idiomatic visual pun recognition is empirically evaluated via top–1 recognition accuracy, defined as

$$\mathrm{Accuracy} = \frac{1}{|\mathcal I|}\sum_{i=1}^{|\mathcal I|} \mathbf{1}\left[\hat y_i = y_i\right]$$

where $y_i$ is the target idiom and $\hat y_i$ the MLLM’s inference for the synthesized image (Xiao et al., 28 Nov 2025). IRFL extends this with idiom detection accuracy, Precision@F for retrieval, and F1 for figurative classification (Yosef et al., 2023). UNPIE employs exact-match accuracy for pun grounding, BERTScore-based disambiguation, and BLEU-4/METEOR for reconstruction (Chung et al., 1 Oct 2024). Chinese rebus art introduces Absolute and Similarity Scores for element identification, categorical matching, and free-form expert scoring (1–10 scale) for explanation quality (Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024).

Empirical findings consistently demonstrate human–machine gaps:

• Visual Puns from Idioms: GPT-MLLM achieves up to $79.8\%$ idiom recognition, Gemini $74.8\%$, Claude $62\%$, Gemma $58.1\%$ (open-source); Claude as LLM is strongest prompt generator at $57.6\%$ (Xiao et al., 28 Nov 2025).
• IRFL: Human accuracy $97\%$, best zero-shot (CLIP-RN50x64) $22\%$ (Figurative), $56\%$ (Figurative+Literal); fine-tuned CLIP $46\%$/$41\%$ (Yosef et al., 2023).
• UNPIE: Socratic Models and VLMs outperform text-only baselines by $5$-$20$ percentage points in grounding, $10$-$25$ in disambiguation, up to $22$ in reconstruction (Chung et al., 1 Oct 2024).
• Chinese Pun Rebus Art: Humans $55.3\%$ symbolic matching, best AI $40.4\%$ (GPT-4o); explanation scores max out at $3.5/10$ (experts $10/10$) (Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024).
• ViPE: Triplet retrieval (metaphor→image) zero-shot $32.1\%$ (ViPE), $28.7\%$ (GPT-3.5), $27.8\%$ (human); image→elaboration $79.8\%$ for ViPE, $66.3\%$ GPT-3.5, $77.2\%$ human (Shahmohammadi et al., 2023).

The role of multimodal fusion, prompt engineering, and iterative refinement is prominent—MLLM capacity dominates end-to-end success rates, and most gains occur within the first three iterations of guided prompt editing.

5. Cultural and Mechanistic Diversity

Idiom-based visual pun research reveals substantial cultural and mechanistic variation:

• Western idioms/puns: Typically encode literal-figurative ambiguity via object juxtaposition, scene composition, or contextual cues within the image or prompt (Xiao et al., 28 Nov 2025, Chung et al., 1 Oct 2024).
• Chinese rebus art: Utilizes homophones, logographic composition, and centuries-old mnemonic symbolism, such as paintings whose elements (e.g., monkey atop horse) map phonetically, visually, and morphologically onto an idiomatic wish (e.g., career advancement) (Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024).

Mechanistically, artists and generative pipelines exploit pure homophones, shape cues, semantic borrowing, and contextually weighted elements to create multi-layered visual puns. These forms, documented via mechanism taxonomies and annotation, pose unique challenges to VLMs by demanding “image → sound → meaning” reasoning beyond mere object recognition.

Models trained predominantly on English-centric corpora exhibit bias, misrecognition, and hallucinations when encountering culturally specific idioms, with in-context learning providing only marginal improvements. Fine-tuning on mechanism-aware annotations and enriching pretraining corpora with bilingual, curated datasets demonstrably improves performance (e.g., custom GPT-4V trained on 68 Chinese artworks achieves $66\%$ symbolic matching) (Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024).

6. Practical Applications and Ongoing Challenges

Idiom-based visual pun synthesis and recognition underpin numerous downstream applications:

• Creative composition: Automatic generation of witty, dual-meaning images for educational media, entertainment, or viral campaigns (Xiao et al., 28 Nov 2025, Shahmohammadi et al., 2023).
• Benchmarking figurative comprehension: Datasets such as IRFL, UNPIE, and Pun Rebus Art serve as rigorous testbeds for cross-modal reasoning and language–vision fusion model evaluation (Yosef et al., 2023, Chung et al., 1 Oct 2024, Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024).
• Cultural analysis: Decoding and cataloging idiom-based rebus art supports cross-linguistic and historical research on symbolic encoding and cultural transmission (Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024).

Persistent challenges include the literal bias of standard VLMs, insufficient phonetic-semantic knowledge for non-English idiomatic art, limited effectiveness of in-context learning, and the need for hybrid approaches mixing mechanism-aware fine-tuning, diverse model architectures, and large-scale multimodal corpora. Most current evaluation protocols remain fully automatic (MLLM-based), with limited human gold standard involvement (e.g., 5% spot-check in (Xiao et al., 28 Nov 2025)).

7. Future Directions

Research in idiom-based visual puns is converging on several future axes:

• Development of multi-T2IM architectures for style diversity
• Incorporation of human-in-the-loop pipeline steps for broader semantic validation
• Expansion into cross-lingual and cross-cultural idioms with mechanism annotation and cultural lexicon integration
• Construction of structure-aware and sense-tagged fusion architectures for robust multimodal disambiguation
• Task-specific metrics such as top-$k$ accuracy, multi-faceted explanation scoring, and crowdsourced evaluations across demographic strata

Continued progress will depend on the synthesis of large, annotated multimodal datasets, advances in multimodal reasoning capacity, and culturally aware pretraining and fine-tuning regimes (Xiao et al., 28 Nov 2025, Zhang et al., 14 Jun 2024, Chung et al., 1 Oct 2024, Shahmohammadi et al., 2023, Yosef et al., 2023).