Humor in Pixels: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models Understanding of Online Comics
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EMNLP 2025)
Yuriel Ryan*, Rui Yang Tan*, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
* co-first authors
Education
M.Eng (Research)
Singapore University of Technology and Design
Expected 2025 Sep to 2026 Sep
- Cumulative GPA: 5.00/5.00
- AI Singapore Accelerated Masters Scholar (2024 Sep - 2026 Sep)
- DSO-AISG Research Award (2025 Sep - 2026 Sep)
B.Eng (Computer Science, Minor in AI)
Singapore University of Technology and Design
2021 Sep to 2025 May
- Cumulative GPA: 4.70/5.00, Honors with Highest Distinction
- SUTD Undergraduate Merit Scholar (2021 Sep - 2024 Aug)
Global Exchange Program
Aalto University
Finland, Jan 2024 to Jun 2025
- Awarded the KKH Global Exchange Award (2024 Spring)
- Exchange Student under Aalto University’s School of Science
| Relevant Courses | Grade |
|---|---|
| 99.512 Mathematics for AI – Postgraduate | A |
| 51.504 Machine Learning – Postgraduate | A |
| 50.050 Discrete Mathematics and Algorithm Design | A |
| 50.035 Computer Vision | A |
| 50.007 Machine Learning - Undergraduate | A |
| 50.005 Elements of Software Construction | A- |
| 01.401 Capstone Project (2 Terms) | A- |
| 01.117 Brain-Inspired Computing and it’s Applications | A |
| CS-E4890 Deep Learning | Exchange |
| ELEC-E5550 Statistical Natural Language Processing | Exchange |
| CS-E4800 Artificial Intelligence | Exchange |
Work Experience
Founding AI Engineer, Pallo (formerly Check) (Iterative W25)
2025 January – March
- Built a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow to produce syllabus-accurate outputs, securing a Pre-Seed fund from Iterative VC (Winter 2025).
- Built a data processing pipeline by combining open-source Computer Vision models with LLMs, contributing 8,700 high quality questions to Supabase for RAG.
- Deployed DeepSeek R1 models to Google Cloud Run to solve Singapore GCE A-Level math problems, increasing the accuracy of the final outputs by 36%.
LMM Research Assistant, Social AI Lab (SUTD)
2024 June – December
- Web scraped using Selenium and Beautiful Soup to collect more than 28,000 comics for analysis.
- Recruited and managed 8 participants to evaluate 2,800 comics using Label Studio to assess large multimodal models’ (LMMs such as Qwen2-VL, LLaVa-OV, GPT4o and Gemini) ability to comprehend humor.
LLM Research Intern, DSO National Laboratories
2023 August – December
- Applied the Graph of Thoughts reasoning workflow with LLMs to detect vulnerable code within a 3-layer call stack, reducing incurred API (ChatGPT) costs by 25%.
- Integrated Llama 2 and Code Llama with LangChain to perform Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), further improving contextual understanding.
Technical Skills: Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Google Cloud Platform, SQL, Java