Miko: Multimodal Intention Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models for Social-Media Commonsense Discovery

Social media has become ubiquitous for connecting with others, staying updated with news, expressing opinions, and finding entertainment. However, understanding the intention behind social media posts remains challenging due to the implicit and commonsense nature of these intentions, the need for cross-modality understanding of both text and images, and the presence of noisy information such as hashtags, misspelled words, and complicated abbreviations. To address these challenges, we present MIKO, a Multimodal Intention Knowledge DistillatiOn framework that collaboratively leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) and a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to uncover users' intentions. Specifically, our approach uses an MLLM to interpret the image, an LLM to extract key information from the text, and another LLM to generate intentions. By applying MIKO to publicly available social media datasets, we construct an intention knowledge base featuring 1,372K intentions rooted in 137,287 posts. Moreover, We conduct a two-stage annotation to verify the quality of the generated knowledge and benchmark the performance of widely used LLMs for intention generation, and further apply MIKO to a sarcasm detection dataset and distill a student model to demonstrate the downstream benefits of applying intention knowledge.