Danding Wang

Yongchun Zhu, Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao et al.

The wide dissemination of fake news is increasingly threatening both individuals and society. Fake news detection aims to train a model on the past news and detect fake news of the future. Though great efforts have been made, existing fake news detection methods overlooked the unintended entity bias in the real-world data, which seriously influences models' generalization ability to future data. For example, 97\% of news pieces in 2010-2017 containing the entity `Donald Trump' are real in our data, but the percentage falls down to merely 33\% in 2018. This would lead the model trained on the former set to hardly generalize to the latter, as it tends to predict news pieces about `Donald Trump' as real for lower training loss. In this paper, we propose an entity debiasing framework (\textbf{ENDEF}) which generalizes fake news detection models to the future data by mitigating entity bias from a cause-effect perspective. Based on the causal graph among entities, news contents, and news veracity, we separately model the contribution of each cause (entities and contents) during training. In the inference stage, we remove the direct effect of the entities to mitigate entity bias. Extensive offline experiments on the English and Chinese datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework can largely improve the performance of base fake news detectors, and online tests verify its superiority in practice. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly improve the generalization ability of fake news detection models to the future data. The code has been released at https://github.com/ICTMCG/ENDEF-SIGIR2022.

Beizhe Hu, Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao et al.

Fake news detection has been a critical task for maintaining the health of the online news ecosystem. However, very few existing works consider the temporal shift issue caused by the rapidly-evolving nature of news data in practice, resulting in significant performance degradation when training on past data and testing on future data. In this paper, we observe that the appearances of news events on the same topic may display discernible patterns over time, and posit that such patterns can assist in selecting training instances that could make the model adapt better to future data. Specifically, we design an effective framework FTT (Forecasting Temporal Trends), which could forecast the temporal distribution patterns of news data and then guide the detector to fast adapt to future distribution. Experiments on the real-world temporally split dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework. The code is available at https://github.com/ICTMCG/FTT-ACL23.

Yuyan Bu, Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao et al.

With information consumption via online video streaming becoming increasingly popular, misinformation video poses a new threat to the health of the online information ecosystem. Though previous studies have made much progress in detecting misinformation in text and image formats, video-based misinformation brings new and unique challenges to automatic detection systems: 1) high information heterogeneity brought by various modalities, 2) blurred distinction between misleading video manipulation and nonmalicious artistic video editing, and 3) new patterns of misinformation propagation due to the dominant role of recommendation systems on online video platforms. To facilitate research on this challenging task, we conduct this survey to present advances in misinformation video detection. We first analyze and characterize the misinformation video from three levels including signals, semantics, and intents. Based on the characterization, we systematically review existing works for detection from features of various modalities to techniques for clue integration. We also introduce existing resources including representative datasets and useful tools. Besides summarizing existing studies, we discuss related areas and outline open issues and future directions to encourage and guide more research on misinformation video detection. The corresponding repository is at https://github.com/ICTMCG/Awesome-Misinfo-Video-Detection.

Xiaoyue Mi, Fan Tang, Zonghan Yang et al. · tsinghua

Despite the remarkable advances that have been made in continual learning, the adversarial vulnerability of such methods has not been fully discussed. We delve into the adversarial robustness of memory-based continual learning algorithms and observe limited robustness improvement by directly applying adversarial training techniques. Preliminary studies reveal the twin challenges for building adversarial robust continual learners: accelerated forgetting in continual learning and gradient obfuscation in adversarial robustness. In this study, we put forward a novel adversarial robust memory-based continual learner that adjusts data logits to mitigate the forgetting of pasts caused by adversarial samples. Furthermore, we devise a gradient-based data selection mechanism to overcome the gradient obfuscation caused by limited stored data. The proposed approach can widely integrate with existing memory-based continual learning as well as adversarial training algorithms in a plug-and-play way. Extensive experiments on Split-CIFAR10/100 and Split-Tiny-ImageNet demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving up to 8.13% higher accuracy for adversarial data.

Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao, Xueyao Zhang et al.

Fake news detection is crucial for preventing the dissemination of misinformation on social media. To differentiate fake news from real ones, existing methods observe the language patterns of the news post and "zoom in" to verify its content with knowledge sources or check its readers' replies. However, these methods neglect the information in the external news environment where a fake news post is created and disseminated. The news environment represents recent mainstream media opinion and public attention, which is an important inspiration of fake news fabrication because fake news is often designed to ride the wave of popular events and catch public attention with unexpected novel content for greater exposure and spread. To capture the environmental signals of news posts, we "zoom out" to observe the news environment and propose the News Environment Perception Framework (NEP). For each post, we construct its macro and micro news environment from recent mainstream news. Then we design a popularity-oriented and a novelty-oriented module to perceive useful signals and further assist final prediction. Experiments on our newly built datasets show that the NEP can efficiently improve the performance of basic fake news detectors.

Beizhe Hu, Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao et al.

Detecting fake news requires both a delicate sense of diverse clues and a profound understanding of the real-world background, which remains challenging for detectors based on small language models (SLMs) due to their knowledge and capability limitations. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various tasks, but whether and how LLMs could help with fake news detection remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the potential of LLMs in fake news detection. First, we conduct an empirical study and find that a sophisticated LLM such as GPT 3.5 could generally expose fake news and provide desirable multi-perspective rationales but still underperforms the basic SLM, fine-tuned BERT. Our subsequent analysis attributes such a gap to the LLM's inability to select and integrate rationales properly to conclude. Based on these findings, we propose that current LLMs may not substitute fine-tuned SLMs in fake news detection but can be a good advisor for SLMs by providing multi-perspective instructive rationales. To instantiate this proposal, we design an adaptive rationale guidance network for fake news detection (ARG), in which SLMs selectively acquire insights on news analysis from the LLMs' rationales. We further derive a rationale-free version of ARG by distillation, namely ARG-D, which services cost-sensitive scenarios without querying LLMs. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that ARG and ARG-D outperform three types of baseline methods, including SLM-based, LLM-based, and combinations of small and large language models.

Qiong Nan, Danding Wang, Yongchun Zhu et al.

Both real and fake news in various domains, such as politics, health, and entertainment are spread via online social media every day, necessitating fake news detection for multiple domains. Among them, fake news in specific domains like politics and health has more serious potential negative impacts on the real world (e.g., the infodemic led by COVID-19 misinformation). Previous studies focus on multi-domain fake news detection, by equally mining and modeling the correlation between domains. However, these multi-domain methods suffer from a seesaw problem: the performance of some domains is often improved at the cost of hurting the performance of other domains, which could lead to an unsatisfying performance in specific domains. To address this issue, we propose a Domain- and Instance-level Transfer Framework for Fake News Detection (DITFEND), which could improve the performance of specific target domains. To transfer coarse-grained domain-level knowledge, we train a general model with data of all domains from the meta-learning perspective. To transfer fine-grained instance-level knowledge and adapt the general model to a target domain, we train a language model on the target domain to evaluate the transferability of each data instance in source domains and re-weigh each instance's contribution. Offline experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DITFEND. Online experiments show that DITFEND brings additional improvements over the base models in a real-world scenario.

Tianyun Yang, Danding Wang, Fan Tang et al.

Despite the remarkable progress in generative technology, the Janus-faced issues of intellectual property protection and malicious content supervision have arisen. Efforts have been paid to manage synthetic images by attributing them to a set of potential source models. However, the closed-set classification setting limits the application in real-world scenarios for handling contents generated by arbitrary models. In this study, we focus on a challenging task, namely Open-Set Model Attribution (OSMA), to simultaneously attribute images to known models and identify those from unknown ones. Compared to existing open-set recognition (OSR) tasks focusing on semantic novelty, OSMA is more challenging as the distinction between images from known and unknown models may only lie in visually imperceptible traces. To this end, we propose a Progressive Open Space Expansion (POSE) solution, which simulates open-set samples that maintain the same semantics as closed-set samples but embedded with different imperceptible traces. Guided by a diversity constraint, the open space is simulated progressively by a set of lightweight augmentation models. We consider three real-world scenarios and construct an OSMA benchmark dataset, including unknown models trained with different random seeds, architectures, and datasets from known ones. Extensive experiments on the dataset demonstrate POSE is superior to both existing model attribution methods and off-the-shelf OSR methods.

Yuyan Bu, Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao et al.

As short-form video-sharing platforms become a significant channel for news consumption, fake news in short videos has emerged as a serious threat in the online information ecosystem, making developing detection methods for this new scenario an urgent need. Compared with that in text and image formats, fake news on short video platforms contains rich but heterogeneous information in various modalities, posing a challenge to effective feature utilization. Unlike existing works mostly focusing on analyzing what is presented, we introduce a novel perspective that considers how it might be created. Through the lens of the creative process behind news video production, our empirical analysis uncovers the unique characteristics of fake news videos in material selection and editing. Based on the obtained insights, we design FakingRecipe, a creative process-aware model for detecting fake news short videos. It captures the fake news preferences in material selection from sentimental and semantic aspects and considers the traits of material editing from spatial and temporal aspects. To improve evaluation comprehensiveness, we first construct FakeTT, an English dataset for this task, and conduct experiments on both FakeTT and the existing Chinese FakeSV dataset. The results show FakingRecipe's superiority in detecting fake news on short video platforms.

Tianyun Yang, Juan Cao, Danding Wang et al.

Nowadays, generative models are shaping various fields such as art, design, and human-computer interaction, yet accompanied by challenges related to copyright infringement and content management. In response, existing research seeks to identify the unique fingerprints on the images they generate, which can be leveraged to attribute the generated images to their source models. Existing methods, however, are constrained to identifying models within a static set included in the classifier training, failing to adapt to newly emerged unseen models dynamically. To bridge this gap, we aim to develop a generalized model fingerprint extractor capable of zero-shot attribution, effectively attributes unseen models without exposure during training. Central to our method is a model synthesis technique, which generates numerous synthetic models mimicking the fingerprint patterns of real-world generative models. The design of the synthesis technique is motivated by observations on how the basic generative model's architecture building blocks and parameters influence fingerprint patterns, and it is validated through two designed metrics that examine synthetic models' fidelity and diversity. Our experiments demonstrate that this fingerprint extractor, trained solely on synthetic models, achieves impressive zero-shot generalization on a wide range of real-world generative models, improving model identification and verification accuracy on unseen models by over 40% and 15%, respectively, compared to existing approaches.

Qiong Nan, Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao et al.

Both accuracy and timeliness are key factors in detecting fake news on social media. However, most existing methods encounter an accuracy-timeliness dilemma: Content-only methods guarantee timeliness but perform moderately because of limited available information, while social con-text-based ones generally perform better but inevitably lead to latency because of social context accumulation needs. To break such a dilemma, a feasible but not well-studied solution is to leverage social contexts (e.g., comments) from historical news for training a detection model and apply it to newly emerging news without social contexts. This requires the model to (1) sufficiently learn helpful knowledge from social contexts, and (2) be well compatible with situations that social contexts are available or not. To achieve this goal, we propose to absorb and parameterize useful knowledge from comments in historical news and then inject it into a content-only detection model. Specifically, we design the Comments ASsisted FakE News Detection method (CAS-FEND), which transfers useful knowledge from a comment-aware teacher model to a content-only student model and detects newly emerging news with the student model. Experiments show that the CAS-FEND student model outperforms all content-only methods and even comment-aware ones with 1/4 comments as inputs, demonstrating its superiority for early detection.

Zhihao Sun, Haipeng Fang, Xinying Zhao et al.

The accelerated advancement of generative AI significantly enhance the viability and effectiveness of generative regional editing methods. This evolution render the image manipulation more accessible, thereby intensifying the risk of altering the conveyed information within original images and even propagating misinformation. Consequently, there exists a critical demand for robust capable of detecting the edited images. However, the lack of comprehensive dataset containing images edited with abundant and advanced generative regional editing methods poses a substantial obstacle to the advancement of corresponding detection methods. We endeavor to fill the vacancy by constructing the GRE dataset, a large-scale generative regional editing dataset with the following advantages: 1) Collection of real-world original images, focusing on two frequently edited scenarios. 2) Integration of a logical and simulated editing pipeline, leveraging multiple large models in various modalities. 3) Inclusion of various editing approaches with distinct architectures. 4) Provision of comprehensive analysis tasks. We perform comprehensive experiments with proposed three tasks: edited image classification, edited method attribution and edited region localization, providing analysis of distinct editing methods and evaluation of detection methods in related fields. We expect that the GRE dataset can promote further research and exploration in the field of generative region editing detection.

Xiaoyue Mi, Fan Tang, Yepeng Weng et al.

Despite the effectiveness in improving the robustness of neural networks, adversarial training has suffered from the natural accuracy degradation problem, i.e., accuracy on natural samples has reduced significantly. In this study, we reveal that natural accuracy degradation is highly related to the disruption of the natural sample topology in the representation space by quantitative and qualitative experiments. Based on this observation, we propose Topology-pReserving Adversarial traINing (TRAIN) to alleviate the problem by preserving the topology structure of natural samples from a standard model trained only on natural samples during adversarial training. As an additional regularization, our method can be combined with various popular adversarial training algorithms, taking advantage of both sides. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet show that our proposed method achieves consistent and significant improvements over various strong baselines in most cases. Specifically, without additional data, TRAIN achieves up to 8.86% improvement in natural accuracy and 6.33% improvement in robust accuracy.

Zhengjia Wang, Danding Wang, Qiang Sheng et al.

This paper investigates the detection of misinformation, which deceives readers by explicitly fabricating misleading content or implicitly omitting important information necessary for informed judgment. While the former has been extensively studied, omission-based deception remains largely overlooked, even though it can subtly guide readers toward false conclusions under the illusion of completeness. To pioneer in this direction, this paper presents OmiGraph, the first omission-aware framework for misinformation detection. Specifically, OmiGraph constructs an omission-aware graph for the target news by utilizing a contextual environment that captures complementary perspectives of the same event, thereby surfacing potentially omitted contents. Based on this graph, omission-oriented relation modeling is then proposed to identify the internal contextual dependencies, as well as the dynamic omission intents, formulating a comprehensive omission relation representation. Finally, to extract omission patterns for detection, OmiGraph introduces omission-aware message-passing and aggregation that establishes holistic deception perception by integrating the omission contents and relations. Experiments show that, by considering the omission perspective, our approach attains remarkable performance, achieving average improvements of +5.4% F1 and +5.3% ACC on two large-scale benchmarks.

Hao Mi, Qiang Sheng, Shaofei Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to factual hallucinations, risking their reliability in real-world applications. Existing hallucination detectors mainly extract micro-level intrinsic patterns for uncertainty quantification or elicit macro-level self-judgments through verbalized prompts. However, these methods address only a single facet of the hallucination, focusing either on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, thereby treating these inherently coupled behaviors in isolation and failing to exploit their interdependence for a holistic view. In this paper, we propose LaaB (Logical Consistency-as-a-Bridge), a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection. LaaB introduces a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space. By leveraging the inherent logical bridge where response and meta-judgment labels are either the same or opposite based on the self-judgment's semantics, LaaB aligns and integrates dual-view signals via mutual learning and enhances the hallucination detection. Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB.

Yuhui Shi, Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao et al.

With the rapidly increasing application of large language models (LLMs), their abuse has caused many undesirable societal problems such as fake news, academic dishonesty, and information pollution. This makes AI-generated text (AIGT) detection of great importance. Among existing methods, white-box methods are generally superior to black-box methods in terms of performance and generalizability, but they require access to LLMs' internal states and are not applicable to black-box settings. In this paper, we propose to estimate word generation probabilities as pseudo white-box features via multiple re-sampling to help improve AIGT detection under the black-box setting. Specifically, we design POGER, a proxy-guided efficient re-sampling method, which selects a small subset of representative words (e.g., 10 words) for performing multiple re-sampling in black-box AIGT detection. Experiments on datasets containing texts from humans and seven LLMs show that POGER outperforms all baselines in macro F1 under black-box, partial white-box, and out-of-distribution settings and maintains lower re-sampling costs than its existing counterparts.

Beizhe Hu, Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao et al.

Online fake news moderation now faces a new challenge brought by the malicious use of large language models (LLMs) in fake news production. Though existing works have shown LLM-generated fake news is hard to detect from an individual aspect, it remains underexplored how its large-scale release will impact the news ecosystem. In this study, we develop a simulation pipeline and a dataset with ~56k generated news of diverse types to investigate the effects of LLM-generated fake news within neural news recommendation systems. Our findings expose a truth decay phenomenon, where real news is gradually losing its advantageous position in news ranking against fake news as LLM-generated news is involved in news recommendation. We further provide an explanation about why truth decay occurs from a familiarity perspective and show the positive correlation between perplexity and news ranking. Finally, we discuss the threats of LLM-generated fake news and provide possible countermeasures. We urge stakeholders to address this emerging challenge to preserve the integrity of news ecosystems.

Zhengjia Wang, Danding Wang, Qiang Sheng et al.

Understanding the intent behind information is crucial. However, news as a medium of public discourse still lacks a structured investigation of perceived news intent and its application. To advance this field, this paper reviews interdisciplinary studies on intentional action and introduces a conceptual deconstruction-based news intent understanding framework (NINT). This framework identifies the components of intent, facilitating a structured representation of news intent and its applications. Building upon NINT, we contribute a new intent perception dataset. Moreover, we investigate the potential of intent assistance on news-related tasks, such as significant improvement (+2.2% macF1) in the task of fake news detection. We hope that our findings will provide valuable insights into action-based intent cognition and computational social science.

Ya Wu, Qiang Sheng, Danding Wang et al.

Ethical decision-making is a critical aspect of human judgment, and the growing use of LLMs in decision-support systems necessitates a rigorous evaluation of their moral reasoning capabilities. However, existing assessments primarily rely on single-step evaluations, failing to capture how models adapt to evolving ethical challenges. Addressing this gap, we introduce the Multi-step Moral Dilemmas (MMDs), the first dataset specifically constructed to evaluate the evolving moral judgments of LLMs across 3,302 five-stage dilemmas. This framework enables a fine-grained, dynamic analysis of how LLMs adjust their moral reasoning across escalating dilemmas. Our evaluation of nine widely used LLMs reveals that their value preferences shift significantly as dilemmas progress, indicating that models recalibrate moral judgments based on scenario complexity. Furthermore, pairwise value comparisons demonstrate that while LLMs often prioritize the value of care, this value can sometimes be superseded by fairness in certain contexts, highlighting the dynamic and context-dependent nature of LLM ethical reasoning. Our findings call for a shift toward dynamic, context-aware evaluation paradigms, paving the way for more human-aligned and value-sensitive development of LLMs.

Yang Li, Qiang Sheng, Zhengjia Wang et al.

The misuse of large language models (LLMs) requires precise detection of synthetic text. Existing works mainly follow binary or ternary classification settings, which can only distinguish pure human/LLM text or collaborative text at best. This remains insufficient for the nuanced regulation, as the LLM-polished human text and humanized LLM text often trigger different policy consequences. In this paper, we explore fine-grained LLM-generated text detection under a rigorous four-class setting. To handle such complexities, we propose RACE (Rhetorical Analysis for Creator-Editor Modeling), a fine-grained detection method that characterizes the distinct signatures of creator and editor. Specifically, RACE utilizes Rhetorical Structure Theory to construct a logic graph for the creator's foundation while extracting Elementary Discourse Unit-level features for the editor's style. Experiments show that RACE outperforms 12 baselines in identifying fine-grained types with low false alarms, offering a policy-aligned solution for LLM regulation.

Sheng Liu, Qiang Sheng, Danding Wang et al.

Despite advances in improving large language model (LLM) to refuse to answer malicious instructions, widely used LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks where attackers generate instructions with distributions differing from safety alignment corpora. New attacks expose LLMs' inability to recognize unseen malicious instructions, highlighting a critical distributional mismatch between training data and real-world attacks that forces developers into reactive patching cycles. To tackle this challenge, we propose IMAGINE, a synthesis framework that leverages embedding space distribution analysis to generate jailbreak-like instructions. This approach effectively fills the distributional gap between authentic jailbreak patterns and safety alignment corpora. IMAGINE follows an iterative optimization process that dynamically evolves text generation distributions across iterations, thereby augmenting the coverage of safety alignment data distributions through synthesized data examples. Based on the safety-aligned corpus enhanced through IMAGINE, our framework demonstrates significant decreases in attack success rate on Qwen2.5, Llama3.1, and Llama3.2 without compromising their utility.

Zhengjia Wang, Qiang Sheng, Danding Wang et al.

Fake news detection is an important and challenging task for defending online information integrity. Existing state-of-the-art approaches typically extract news semantic clues, such as writing patterns that include emotional words, stylistic features, etc. However, detectors tuned solely to such semantic clues can easily fall into surface detection patterns, which can shift rapidly in dynamic environments, leading to limited performance in the evolving news landscape. To address this issue, this paper investigates a novel perspective by incorporating news intent into fake news detection, bridging intents and semantics together. The core insight is that by considering news intents, one can deeply understand the inherent thoughts behind news deception, rather than the surface patterns within words alone. To achieve this goal, we propose Graph-based Intent-Semantic Joint Modeling (InSide) for fake news detection, which models deception clues from both semantic and intent signals via graph-based joint learning. Specifically, InSide reformulates news semantic and intent signals into heterogeneous graph structures, enabling long-range context interaction through entity guidance and capturing both holistic and implementation-level intent via coarse-to-fine intent modeling. To achieve better alignment between semantics and intents, we further develop a dynamic pathway-based graph alignment strategy for effective message passing and aggregation across these signals by establishing a common space. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed InSide compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Danding Wang, Wencan Zhang, Brian Y. Lim

Feature attribution is widely used in interpretable machine learning to explain how influential each measured input feature value is for an output inference. However, measurements can be uncertain, and it is unclear how the awareness of input uncertainty can affect the trust in explanations. We propose and study two approaches to help users to manage their perception of uncertainty in a model explanation: 1) transparently show uncertainty in feature attributions to allow users to reflect on, and 2) suppress attribution to features with uncertain measurements and shift attribution to other features by regularizing with an uncertainty penalty. Through simulation experiments, qualitative interviews, and quantitative user evaluations, we identified the benefits of moderately suppressing attribution uncertainty, and concerns regarding showing attribution uncertainty. This work adds to the understanding of handling and communicating uncertainty for model interpretability.