ReMoD: Rethinking Modality Contribution in Multimodal Stance Detection via Dual Reasoning

Abstract: Multimodal Stance Detection (MSD) is a crucial task for understanding public opinion on social media. Existing work simply fuses information from various modalities to learn stance representations, overlooking the varying contributions of stance expression from different modalities. Therefore, stance misunderstanding noises may be drawn into the stance learning process due to the risk of learning errors by rough modality combination. To address this, we get inspiration from the dual-process theory of human cognition and propose ReMoD, a framework that Rethinks Modality contribution of stance expression through a Dual-reasoning paradigm. ReMoD integrates experience-driven intuitive reasoning to capture initial stance cues with deliberate reflective reasoning to adjust for modality biases, refine stance judgments, and thereby dynamically weight modality contributions based on their actual expressive power for the target stance. Specifically, the intuitive stage queries the Modality Experience Pool (MEP) and Semantic Experience Pool (SEP) to form an initial stance hypothesis, prioritizing historically impactful modalities. This hypothesis is then refined in the reflective stage via two reasoning chains: Modality-CoT updates MEP with adaptive fusion strategies to amplify relevant modalities, while Semantic-CoT refines SEP with deeper contextual insights of stance semantics. These dual experience structures are continuously refined during training and recalled at inference to guide robust and context-aware stance decisions. Extensive experiments on the public MMSD benchmark demonstrate that our ReMoD significantly outperforms most baseline models and exhibits strong generalization capabilities.