Aug 2026· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2· 0 citations· 23 references
TL;DR
DAR-Lite is proposed, a serial two-stage framework that rethinks the detection pipeline through explicit decoupling of representation denoising and contextual reasoning, and achieves a favorable balance between detection performance and computational cost.
Abstract
The proliferation of social media has created fertile ground for misinformation, a challenge further intensified by recent advances in generative artificial intelligence. Modern fake news increasingly takes the form of sophisticated multimodal campaigns, where synthetic images and stylistically manipulated text are jointly employed to evade existing detection systems. Despite substantial progress, real-world deployment of multimodal fake news detection models remains constrained by an ''impossible triangle'' of accuracy, inference efficiency, and robustness. To address these challenges, we propose DAR-Lite, a serial two-stage framework that rethinks the detection pipeline through explicit decoupling of representation denoising and contextual reasoning. In the first stage, a variational information bottleneck distills compact and noise-invariant semantic anchors from raw image--text inputs, reducing sensitivity to nuisance factors. In the second stage, an adaptive reasoning engine integrates retrieval-augmented verification, social credibility propagation, and dynamic propagation signals via gated cross-attention to perform structured reasoning over heterogeneous contexts. An auxiliary logical fallacy detection task further encourages reasoning beyond surface-level pattern matching. Extensive experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that DAR-Lite consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly under low false-positive constraints critical for real-world applications. Efficiency analyses further show that the proposed serial architecture achieves a favorable balance between detection performance and computational cost, making DAR-Lite suitable for practical, large-scale misinformation detection.
The results indicate that explicitly modeling semantic conflict as a discriminative feature effectively improves detection precision and generalization, providing a robust solution for factual verification in complex media environments.
Zi-Heng Wang, Junfang Song, Shuyu Wang et al.· Multimedia Systems· 0 citations
The rapid proliferation of digitally distributed news has made large-scale automated verification an urgent research priority, as deceptive content spreads across social platforms faster than manual reviewers can evaluate it. This work introduces a two-stage deep learning pipeline in which a pretrained BERT encoder generates rich contextual token embeddings that are subsequently processed by a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network, enabling the classifier to exploit both sentence-level semantics and document-level narrative flow simultaneously. Experiments on the WELFake benchmark [1] following a standardised cleaning pipeline—lowercasing, URL stripping, tokenisation, stop-word removal, and WordNet lemmatisation— yielded 98.7 % accuracy and an F1-score of 0.986. This surpasses a BERT-only baseline by 3.1 percentage points and exceeds several previously published state-of-the-art results. The gains confirm that coupling transformer-based semantic representations with recurrent sequential modelling produces a measurable and reproducible improvement in misinformation detection. Planned extensions include multilingual evaluation and knowledge-distilled encoder replacements targeting real-time throughput constraints.
Ardra P Namboodiri, Archa P S, Honey Mol O· 2026 6th International Confe...· 0 citations
TERN induces latent deception types from image-side multimodal features through prototype-based clustering, uses the induced assignments as structural priors for downstream veracity prediction, disentangles type-discriminative factors from semantic content, and performs type-conditioned hierarchical reasoning over text semantics, image authenticity, and cross-modal consistency.
A hybrid transformer-based ensemble model for automated fake news identification using the FakeNewsNet dataset is proposed and Experimental results show that the ensemble model achieves an accuracy of approximately 93%, outperforming the individual constituent models.
M. E. Babu, G. Sukanya· International Journal for Re...· 0 citations
A multi-model learning framework that combines the complementary strengths of classical machine learning classifiers, deep sequential neural networks, and transformer-based contextual language models to detect fake news on social media is proposed.
Priya Verma· International Journal of Res...· 0 citations
Multimodal fake news combining text and images has become increasingly prevalent, fueled by the rapid dissemination on social media. Existing approaches predominantly rely on supervised learning–driven small multimodal language models, yet they are constrained by the knowledge scope and logical reasoning capabilities limited by training data: their performance degrades significantly when encountering novel content not covered in the training data, and they typically provide only uninterpretable binary true/false predictions. To address these challenges, we propose the Metacognitive Agentic Reasoning for Multimodal Fake News Detection(MAR), a framework that integrates multi-agent metacognitive debate with external knowledge retrieval to enhance the accuracy, generalization, and interpretability of multimodal fake news detection. At its core, MAR introduces a news-domain informed and metacognition-inspired multi-agent reasoning mechanism: it first generates several prior pseudo-labels of the news domain, and defines the characteristics of two opposing agents (i.e., Believer and Skeptic) leveraging these pseudo-labels; then, the Believer and Skeptic go through a three-stage ''Draft – Self-Critique – Refine'' interactive debate simulating humans' learning behavior, called the metacognitive debate. Specifically, MAR first generates an initial evidence-grounded judgment (Draft), then critically reflects on their own and others' arguments (Self-Critique), and finally iteratively refines their conclusions by incorporating internal or external evidence (Refine). To improve factual reliability, the framework dynamically retrieves trustworthy external knowledge via web and reverse image searches, thereby mitigating the hallucinations inherent in large language models. Experiments show that MAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks and significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of generalization and interpretability. The source code is available at https://github.com/Averdgr/MAR_KDD.
Wenyu Chen, Hengbing Dong, Junhao Wa et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations