UNITE-FND: Reframing Multimodal Fake News Detection through Unimodal Scene Translation
This addresses the problem of high computational demands in fake news detection for resource-constrained environments, offering a practical alternative.
The paper tackles multimodal fake news detection by reframing it as a unimodal text classification task, achieving 92.52% accuracy in binary classification while reducing computational costs by over 10x compared to prior multimodal models.
Multimodal fake news detection typically demands complex architectures and substantial computational resources, posing deployment challenges in real-world settings. We introduce UNITE-FND, a novel framework that reframes multimodal fake news detection as a unimodal text classification task. We propose six specialized prompting strategies with Gemini 1.5 Pro, converting visual content into structured textual descriptions, and enabling efficient text-only models to preserve critical visual information. To benchmark our approach, we introduce Uni-Fakeddit-55k, a curated dataset family of 55,000 samples each, each processed through our multimodal-to-unimodal translation framework. Experimental results demonstrate that UNITE-FND achieves 92.52% accuracy in binary classification, surpassing prior multimodal models while reducing computational costs by over 10x (TinyBERT variant: 14.5M parameters vs. 250M+ in SOTA models). Additionally, we propose a comprehensive suite of five novel metrics to evaluate image-to-text conversion quality, ensuring optimal information preservation. Our results demonstrate that structured text-based representations can replace direct multimodal processing with minimal loss of accuracy, making UNITE-FND a practical and scalable alternative for resource-constrained environments.