Abstract
Small-scale Large Language Models (LLMs) natively default to literal semantic interpretations, making few-shot irony detection a persistent challenge in noisy, user-generated text. We introduce the Robust Dual-Signal (RDS) Fusion framework, a hybrid neuro-symbolic architecture that compresses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning trajectories without Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Evaluated on a strictly held-out TweetEval test set (), RDS achieves accuracy and a Macro F1 of , matching the absolute performance ceiling of a fine-tuned BERTweet. On the heavily imbalanced iSarcasm dataset, the frozen CoT pipeline filters of out-of-distribution hallucinations, yielding a few-shot Macro F1 of and Ironic F1 of , outperforming multiple heavily supervised SemEval transformer ensembles. Statistical ablation confirms this structural synergy: while adding the symbolic prior to the neural baseline yields an insignificant gain, and the RDS fusion is statistically insignificant compared to the combined RoBERTa and symbolic prior ablation; the concurrent fusion achieves a statistically significant improvement over the standalone baseline ().