Learning Multimodal Attention Mixed with Frequency Domain Information as Detector for Fake News Detection

Zihan Ma, Huan Liu, Zhi Zeng, Hao Guo, Xiang Zhao, Minnan Luo

Abstract: Detecting fake news on social media has become a crucial task in combating online misinformation and countering malicious propaganda. Existing methods rely on semantic consistency across modalities to fuse features and determine news authenticity. However, cunning fake news publisher manipulate image to ensure a high level of semantic consistency between news post and image, making it more difficult to distinguish fake news. To this end, we propose MHFFD (Mixed High-Frequency Feature Detector), a novel fake news detection framework that utilizes token-level semantic consistency evaluation to identify key elements in news content and provide guidance for discovering image manipulation and learning better news representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MHFFD outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two widely used fake news detection datasets. Further research also validates the effectiveness of token-level semantic alignment and manipulation detection.