Toward Multimodal Fake News Detection by Multi-perspective Rationale Generation and Verification

The rapid proliferation of social media platforms has led to a surge in multimodal fake news, where deceptive content often combines text and images to mislead audiences. Traditional unimodal detection methods struggle to address the complexity of such content, necessitating holistic multimodal approaches. While the latest advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer new opportunities for enhancing detection performance by analyzing multi-dimensional features, including source credibility, cross-modal contradictions, emotional bias, and manipulative writing patterns, these methods suffer from a key flaw: a susceptibility to hallucinations or erroneous reasoning, which can lead to flawed conclusions and ultimately biased detection results. To mitigate this challenge, we propose the Multimodal Fake News Detection via Multi-perspective Rationale Generation and Verification (MMRGV) model. Our method employs a cross-verification mechanism to screen and reconcile contradictions among different rationales, thereby preserving the LLM’s analytical advantages while mitigating the impact of erroneous reasoning or hallucinations on the final detection. Subsequently, these optimized rationales are fused via an adaptive weighting strategy to output a robust final prediction. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (Twitter, Weibo, and GossipCop) demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy of 0.9972, 0.9663, and 0.8772 respectively, and significantly outperforming existing baselines. These results validate the effectiveness of multi-perspective rationale generation and cross-verification in enhancing multimodal fake news detection, offering a resilient solution to combat misinformation in the era of generative AI.