Wei Zhou

Lingwei Wei, Dou Hu, Wei Zhou et al.

Many fake news detection studies have achieved promising performance by extracting effective semantic and structure features from both content and propagation trees. However, it is challenging to apply them to practical situations, especially when using the trained propagation-based models to detect news with no propagation data. Towards this scenario, we study a new task named cold-start fake news detection, which aims to detect content-only samples with missing propagation. To achieve the task, we design a simple but effective Structure Adversarial Net (SAN) framework to learn transferable features from available propagation to boost the detection of content-only samples. SAN introduces a structure discriminator to estimate dissimilarities among learned features with and without propagation, and further learns structure-invariant features to enhance the generalization of existing propagation-based methods for content-only samples. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments on three datasets. Results show the challenge of the new task and the effectiveness of our SAN framework.

Fanxiao Li, Jiaying Wu, Tingchao Fu et al.

The proliferation of multimodal misinformation poses growing threats to public discourse and societal trust. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have enabled recent progress in multimodal misinformation detection (MMD), the rise of generative AI (GenAI) tools introduces a new challenge: GenAI-driven news diversity, characterized by highly varied and complex content. We show that this diversity induces multi-level drift, comprising (1) model-level misperception drift, where stylistic variations disrupt a model's internal reasoning, and (2) evidence-level drift, where expression diversity degrades the quality or relevance of retrieved external evidence. These drifts significantly degrade the robustness of current LVLM-based MMD systems. To systematically study this problem, we introduce DriftBench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 16,000 news instances across six categories of diversification. We design three evaluation tasks: (1) robustness of truth verification under multi-level drift; (2) susceptibility to adversarial evidence contamination generated by GenAI; and (3) analysis of reasoning consistency across diverse inputs. Experiments with six state-of-the-art LVLM-based detectors show substantial performance drops (average F1 -14.8%) and increasingly unstable reasoning traces, with even more severe failures under adversarial evidence injection. Our findings uncover fundamental vulnerabilities in existing MMD systems and suggest an urgent need for more resilient approaches in the GenAI era.