Towards Robust and Realible Multimodal Fake News Detection with Incomplete Modality

Abstract: Multimodal fake news detection (MFND) has become an urgent task with the emergence of huge multimodal fake content on social media platforms. Previous studies mainly focus on complex feature extraction and fusion to learn discriminative information from multimodal content. However, in real-world applications, multimedia news may naturally lose some information during dissemination, resulting in modality incompleteness, which is detrimental to the generalization and robustness of existing models. To this end, we propose a novel generic and robust multimodal fusion strategy, termed Multi-expert Modality-incomplete Learning Network (MMLNet), which is simple yet effective. It consists of three key steps: (1) Multi-Expert Collaborative Reasoning to compensate for missing modalities by dynamically leveraging complementary information through multiple experts. (2) Incomplete Modality Adapters compensates for the missing information by leveraging the new feature distribution. (3) Modality Missing Learning leveraging an label-aware adaptive weighting strategy to learn a robust representation with contrastive learning. We evaluate MMLNet on three real-world benchmarks across two languages, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining relative simplicity. By ensuring the accuracy of fake news detection in incomplete modality scenarios caused by information propagation, MMLNet effectively curbs the spread of malicious misinformation. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhyhome/MMLNet.