An Adversarial Benchmark for Fake News Detection Models

Lorenzo Jaime Yu Flores, Yiding Hao

Keywords: Fake News Detection, Adversarial Benchmark

TL;DR: We show that fake news detectors are unable to understand real-world knowledge.

Abstract: With the proliferation of online misinformation, fake news detection has gained importance in the artificial intelligence community. In this paper, we propose an adversarial benchmark that tests the ability of fake news detectors to reason about real-world facts. We formulate adversarial attacks that target three aspects of "understanding": compositional semantics, lexical relations, and sensitivity to modifiers. We test our benchmark using BERT classifiers fine-tuned on the LIAR and Kaggle Fake-News datasets, and show that both models fail to respond to changes in compositional and lexical meaning. Our results strengthen the need for such models to be used in conjunction with other fact checking methods.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/an-adversarial-benchmark-for-fake-news/code)