Mitigating Adversarial Attacks by Transferring LLM-generated Narrative Reasoning for Robust Fake News Detection
Abstract
Propagation-based fake news detectors primarily extract structural patterns from news propagation trees via graph neural networks (GNNs), which are crucial for trustworthy information access on social platforms. However, these systems remain vulnerable to adversarial message injection, increasingly enabled by large language models (LLMs). Such attacks pollute both semantic and structural signals, causing GNN-based aggregators to fuse logically conflicting content and yield unreliable representations. To address this, we propose LLM-TKT, a novel framework that distills LLM-based narrative reasoning into lightweight GNNs for robust fake news detection. The framework operates in two stages. First, we construct an offline LLM-driven narrative hub to synthesize global propagation narratives and diagnose local node-level coherence. Second, we design a dual-level narrative alignment to learn the semantic invariance of propagation with the guidance of propagation narratives. It filters unreliable neighbor nodes via local consistency and optimizes graph representations via global anchoring. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that LLM-TKT significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in defending against sophisticated LLM-driven injection attacks without incurring runtime LLM inference costs.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bo Wang 0069 | 57 | 44 Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models (2024) Multimodal Fake News Detection 44 ExplainHM++: Explainable Harmful Meme Detection With Retrieval-Augmented Debate Between Large Multimodal Models (2026) Multimodal Fake News Detection 44 GOAT-Bench: Safety Insights to Large Multimodal Models through Meme-Based Social Abuse (2026) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 2 | Zihan Ma 0001 | 56 | 83 How Do Social Bots Participate in Misinformation Spread? A Comprehensive Dataset and Analysis (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 60 TwiBot-22: Towards Graph-Based Twitter Bot Detection (2022) Social Media and User Modelling 48 Bridging Interests and Truth: Towards Mitigating Fake News with Personalized and Truthful Recommendations (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Yi R. Fung 0001 | 51 |
Area-chair candidates (6)
| Yi R. Fung 0001 assigned | 51 | 10 papers | |
| Kam-Fai Wong | 31 | 6 papers | |
| Ziyi Ye | 27 | 14 papers | |
| Yankai Chen 0001 | 25 | 6 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 25 | 2 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 25 | 10 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ruichao Yang | 58 | 3 | 44 Reinforcement Subgraph Reasoning for Fake News Detection (2022) Multimodal Fake News Detection 44 Towards Fine-Grained Reasoning for Fake News Detection (2022) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 2 | Bo Wang 0069 assigned | 57 | 3 | 44 Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models (2024) Multimodal Fake News Detection 44 ExplainHM++: Explainable Harmful Meme Detection With Retrieval-Augmented Debate Between Large Multimodal Models (2026) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 3 | Zihan Ma 0001 assigned | 56 | 3 | 83 How Do Social Bots Participate in Misinformation Spread? A Comprehensive Dataset and Analysis (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 60 TwiBot-22: Towards Graph-Based Twitter Bot Detection (2022) Social Media and User Modelling |
|
| 4 | Zhi Zeng 0001 | 51 | 3 | 48 Bridging Interests and Truth: Towards Mitigating Fake News with Personalized and Truthful Recommendations (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 44 Graphing the Truth: Harnessing Causal Insights for Advanced Multimodal Fake News Detection (2025) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 6 | Huaiwen Zhang | 45 | 3 | 60 Learning Temporal Event Knowledge for Continual Social Event Classification (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 44 Synergizing LLMs with Global Label Propagation for Multimodal Fake News Detection (2025) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 7 | Weizhi Xu 0002 | 42 | 3 | 47 Counterfactual Debiasing for Fact Verification (2023) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation 42 Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Evidence-Aware Fake News Detection With Graph Neural Networks (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 8 | Weizhou Shen | 41 | 3 | 60 DialogXL: All-in-One XLNet for Multi-Party Conversation Emotion Recognition (2021) Social Media and User Modelling 60 Multi-Party Conversation Modeling for Emotion Recognition (2024) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 9 | Farima Fatahi Bayat | 40 | 3 | 42 FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 42 Enhancing Language Model Factuality via Activation-Based Confidence Calibration and Guided Decoding (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 10 | Mariano Barone | 40 | 3 | 42 SynthMed: Generating and Detecting Multimodal Deepfakes for Healthcare Communication (2025) Multimodal Fake News Detection 42 Combating Biomedical Misinformation through Multi-modal Claim Detection and Evidence-based Verification (2025) RAG for Domain Applications |
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| 11 | Qisheng Hu | 38 | 3 | 42 Decomposition Dilemmas: Does Claim Decomposition Boost or Burden Fact-Checking Performance? (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 42 Coordinating Search-Informed Reasoning and Reasoning-Guided Search in Claim Verification (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 12 | Sruthi Gorantla | 37 | 3 | 60 CASCADE: Contextual Sarcasm Detection in Online Discussion Forums (2018) Social Media and User Modelling 60 Aspect-Sentiment Embeddings for Company Profiling and Employee Opinion Mining (2018) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 13 | Jimeng Sun 0001 | 37 | 3 | 60 Confluence: conformity influence in large social networks (2013) Social Media and User Modelling 60 MetaFac: community discovery via relational hypergraph factorization (2009) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 14 | Jian Lang | 37 | 3 | 44 Enhancing fake news video detection with self-driven question-answer from LMMs (2026) Multimodal Fake News Detection 44 Nip Rumors in the Bud: Retrieval-Guided Topic-Level Adaptation for Test-Time Fake News Video Detection (2026) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 16 | Chen Zhao 0013 | 31 | 3 | 42 Large Language Models Help Humans Verify Truthfulness - Except When They Are Convincingly Wrong (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 42 FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-content Financial Documents (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 17 | Venktesh V | 31 | 3 | 42 The CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab: Subjectivity, Fact-Checking, Claim Normalization, and Retrieval (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 42 FlashCheck: Exploration of Efficient Evidence Retrieval for Fast Fact-Checking (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 18 | Xinhang Li 0001 | 29 | 3 | 60 Conditional Cross-Platform User Engagement Prediction (2024) Social Media and User Modelling 21 OpenSiteRec: An Open Dataset for Site Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 19 | Sajad Ebrahimi 0001 | 28 | 3 | 42 Peerispect: Claim Verification in Scientific Peer Reviews (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 23 Diffusion-based generative modeling for expert team formation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 20 | Xurong Liang | 28 | 3 | 44 Hate Speech Detection with Generalizable Target-aware Fairness (2024) Multimodal Fake News Detection 24 Erratum: Lightweight Embeddings with Graph Rewiring for Collaborative Filtering (2026) Recommender Systems › Others |
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| 21 | Shijie Wang 0002 | 28 | 3 | 58 Score-Based Generative Diffusion Models for Social Recommendations (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 28 Towards Next-Generation Recommender Systems: A Benchmark for Personalized Recommendation Assistant with LLMs (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 23 | Armin Toroghi | 27 | 3 | 37 Right for Right Reasons: Large Language Models for Verifiable Commonsense Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 37 CoLoTa: A Dataset for Entity-based Commonsense Reasoning over Long-Tail Knowledge (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 24 | Idan Szpektor | 27 | 3 | 42 TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models (2023) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 28 When relevance is not enough: promoting diversity and freshnessin personalized question recommendation (2013) Conversational and Interactive Recommendation |
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| 25 | Yujia Zhou 0002 | 27 | 3 | 61 SimVBG: Simulating Individual Values by Backstory Generation (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 31 Cognitive Personalized Search Integrating Large Language Models with an Efficient Memory Mechanism (2024) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 26 | Yu-An Liu 0028 | 27 | 3 | 24 Thinking Forward and Backward: Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 23 Attack-in-the-Chain: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for Attacks Against Black-Box Neural Ranking Models (2025) Robustness and Adversarial IR |
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| 27 | Jing Liu 0022 | 27 | 3 | 61 Competition-based user expertise score estimation (2011) Social Media and User Modelling 61 Question Difficulty Estimation in Community Question Answering Services (2013) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 28 | Lingling Yi | 26 | 3 | 60 WeSeer: Visual Analysis for Better Information Cascade Prediction of WeChat Articles (2020) Social Media and User Modelling 24 Addressing Confounding Feature Issue for Causal Recommendation (2023) Explainable and Causal Recommendation |
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| 29 | Nancy F. Chen | 26 | 3 | 61 Aligning Large Language Models with Human Opinions through Persona Selection and Value-Belief-Norm Reasoning (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 22 Multimodal Dialogue State Tracking (2022) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 30 | Dan Luo 0004 | 25 | 3 | 26 How Does Topology Bias Distort Message Passing in Graph Recommender? A Dirichlet Energy Perspective (2025) Graph Anomaly and Out-of-Distribution Detection 22 Unbiased Learning-to-Rank Needs Unconfounded Propensity Estimation (2024) Unbiased Learning to Rank |
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| 32 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 25 | 3 | 28 Benefit from Rich: Tackling Search Interaction Sparsity in Search Enhanced Recommendation (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 26 UniSAR: Modeling User Transition Behaviors between Search and Recommendation (2024) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 33 | Shu Zhou 0002 | 25 | 3 | 41 Calibrating Uncertainty with Cross-Model Consistency for LLM Hallucination Mitigation (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness 41 Cascaded Verification Framework: A Progressive Approach for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness |
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| 34 | Mark D. Smucker | 25 | 3 | 40 Resources for Automated Evaluation of Assistive RAG Systems that Help Readers with News Trustworthiness Assessment (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 24 Simulating the Lateral Reader for News Trustworthiness Reports with an Iterative Multi-Agent RAG System (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG |