ExDR: Explanation-driven Dynamic Retrieval Enhancement for Multimodal Fake News Detection
Abstract
The rapid spread of multimodal fake news poses a serious societal threat, as its evolving nature and reliance on timely factual details challenge existing detection methods. Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation provides a promising solution by triggering keyword-based retrieval and incorporating external knowledge, thus enabling both efficient and accurate evidence selection. However, it still faces challenges in addressing issues such as redundant retrieval, coarse similarity, and irrelevant evidence when applied to deceptive content. In this paper, we propose ExDR—an Explanation-driven Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework for Multimodal Fake News Detection. Our framework systematically leverages model-generated explanations in both the retrieval triggering and evidence retrieval modules. It assesses triggering confidence from three complementary dimensions, constructs entity-aware indices by fusing deceptive entities, and retrieves contrastive evidence based on deception-specific features to challenge the initial claim and enhance the final prediction. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, AMG and MR2, demonstrate that ExDR consistently outperforms previous methods in retrieval triggering accuracy, retrieval quality, and overall detection performance, highlighting its effectiveness and generalization capability.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ruichao Yang | 68 | 64 Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models (2024) Multimodal Fake News Detection 64 ExplainHM++: Explainable Harmful Meme Detection With Retrieval-Augmented Debate Between Large Multimodal Models (2026) Multimodal Fake News Detection 64 GOAT-Bench: Safety Insights to Large Multimodal Models through Meme-Based Social Abuse (2026) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 2 | Zhi Zeng 0001 | 61 | 57 Event-Radar: Event-driven Multi-View Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection (2024) Multimodal Fake News Detection 57 Understand, Refine and Summarize: Multi-View Knowledge Progressive Enhancement Learning for Fake News Video Detection (2025) Multimodal Fake News Detection 57 Graphing the Truth: Harnessing Causal Insights for Advanced Multimodal Fake News Detection (2025) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 3 | Bo Wang 0069 | 59 | 65 Adversarial Active Learning based Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Fake News Detection (2020) Graph Learning for Text-Attributed and Heterogeneous Networks 57 Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models (2024) Multimodal Fake News Detection 57 ExplainHM++: Explainable Harmful Meme Detection With Retrieval-Augmented Debate Between Large Multimodal Models (2026) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Yi R. Fung 0001 | 40 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Yi R. Fung 0001 assigned | 40 | 10 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 40 | 15 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian | 40 | 12 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 33 | 2 papers | |
| Kam-Fai Wong | 32 | 6 papers | |
| Xiaoye Qu | 32 | 15 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 31 | 4 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ruichao Yang assigned | 68 | 3 | 64 Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models (2024) Multimodal Fake News Detection 64 ExplainHM++: Explainable Harmful Meme Detection With Retrieval-Augmented Debate Between Large Multimodal Models (2026) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 2 | Zhi Zeng 0001 assigned | 61 | 3 | 57 Event-Radar: Event-driven Multi-View Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection (2024) Multimodal Fake News Detection 57 Understand, Refine and Summarize: Multi-View Knowledge Progressive Enhancement Learning for Fake News Video Detection (2025) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 3 | Zihan Ma 0001 | 60 | 3 | 57 How Do Social Bots Participate in Misinformation Spread? A Comprehensive Dataset and Analysis (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 57 Event-Radar: Event-driven Multi-View Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection (2024) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 4 | Jian Lang | 59 | 3 | 57 REAL: Retrieval-Augmented Prototype Alignment for Improved Fake News Video Detection (2025) Multimodal Fake News Detection 57 Enhancing fake news video detection with self-driven question-answer from LMMs (2026) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 5 | Bo Wang 0069 assigned | 59 | 3 | 65 Adversarial Active Learning based Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Fake News Detection (2020) Graph Learning for Text-Attributed and Heterogeneous Networks 57 Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models (2024) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 6 | Huaiwen Zhang | 52 | 3 | 57 Synergizing LLMs with Global Label Propagation for Multimodal Fake News Detection (2025) Multimodal Fake News Detection 57 Multi-modal Knowledge-aware Event Memory Network for Social Media Rumor Detection (2019) Multimodal Fake News Detection |
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| 7 | Mariano Barone | 48 | 3 | 64 SynthMed: Generating and Detecting Multimodal Deepfakes for Healthcare Communication (2025) Multimodal Fake News Detection 53 Combining Evidence and Reasoning for Biomedical Fact-Checking (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 11 | Jing Liu 0022 | 38 | 3 | 45 Reinforced Informativeness Optimization for Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 43 REAR: A Relevance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 12 | Navve Wasserman | 38 | 3 | 46 DocReRank: Single-Page Hard Negative Query Generation for Training Multi-Modal RAG Rerankers (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 46 REAL-MM-RAG: A Real-World Multi-Modal Retrieval Benchmark (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 13 | Yujia Zhou 0002 | 37 | 3 | 48 Grounding Language Model with Chunking-Free In-Context Retrieval (2024) Generative Retrieval 48 CorpusLM: Towards a Unified Language Model on Corpus for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2024) Generative Retrieval |
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| 14 | Yu-An Liu 0028 | 35 | 3 | 35 On the Robustness of Generative Information Retrieval Models: An Out-of-Distribution Perspective (2025) Generative Retrieval 33 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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| 15 | Ruqing Zhang 0001 | 35 | 3 | 48 Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Generation-Augmented Retrieval: A Co-Training Approach (2025) Generative Retrieval 48 CorpusBrain++: A Continual Generative Pre-Training Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks (2026) Generative Retrieval |
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| 16 | Tingyu Song | 35 | 3 | 46 LimRank: Less is More for Reasoning-Intensive Information Reranking (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 30 Rethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 17 | Weiwei Sun 0001 | 34 | 3 | 43 Direct Retrieval-augmented Optimization: Synergizing Knowledge Selection and Language Models (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 33 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 18 | Chen Zhao 0013 | 34 | 3 | 46 SportReason: Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning across Tables and Text for Sports Question Answering (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 33 Distantly-Supervised Dense Retrieval Enables Open-Domain Question Answering without Evidence Annotation (2021) Dense Bi-Encoder Training and Representation Learning |
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| 19 | Xinyu Ma 0001 | 34 | 3 | 43 Direct Retrieval-augmented Optimization: Synergizing Knowledge Selection and Language Models (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 37 Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-based Recommendation (2025) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion |
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| 20 | Di Wu 0054 | 34 | 3 | 50 LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval 43 Repoformer: Selective Retrieval for Repository-Level Code Completion (2024) Efficient and Long-Context RAG |
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| 22 | Kaixin Ma | 33 | 3 | 45 Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 43 Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG |
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| 23 | Venktesh V | 33 | 3 | 45 The Surprising Effectiveness of Rankers trained on Expanded Queries (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 45 Reproducing Adaptive Reranking for Reasoning-Intensive IR (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 24 | Shu Zhou 0002 | 33 | 3 | 46 When MLLMs Meet ICH: A visual retrieval-augmented generation-based method for intangible cultural heritage image recognition-take Shadow Puppetry as a case (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 39 Calibrating Uncertainty with Cross-Model Consistency for LLM Hallucination Mitigation (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness |
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| 25 | Jinheon Baek | 32 | 3 | 57 Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA 40 Efficient Long Context Language Model Retrieval with Compression (2025) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency |
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| 26 | Xingyu Tan 0001 | 32 | 3 | 34 PRoH: Dynamic Planning and Reasoning over Knowledge Hypergraphs for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Multimodal and Graph RAG 33 HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |
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| 27 | Weipeng Chen | 32 | 3 | 48 RichRAG: Crafting Rich Responses for Multi-faceted Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 43 HtmlRAG: HTML is Better Than Plain Text for Modeling Retrieved Knowledge in RAG Systems (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 28 | Farima Fatahi Bayat | 32 | 3 | 33 FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 33 Enhancing Language Model Factuality via Activation-Based Confidence Calibration and Guided Decoding (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 29 | Weizhi Xu 0002 | 32 | 3 | 33 Bias Mitigation for Evidence-aware Fake News Detection by Causal Intervention (2022) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 33 Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Evidence-Aware Fake News Detection With Graph Neural Networks (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 30 | Andrew Parry | 32 | 3 | 48 Constructing and Evaluating Declarative RAG Pipelines in PyTerrier (2025) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility 33 Analyzing Adversarial Attacks on Sequence-to-Sequence Relevance Models (2024) Robustness and Adversarial IR |
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| 33 | Idan Szpektor | 32 | 3 | 37 On the Robustness of Dialogue History Representation in Conversational Question Answering: A Comprehensive Study and a New Prompt-based Method (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval 33 TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models (2023) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 34 | Keping Bi | 31 | 3 | 47 Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 45 Beyond Relevance: Utility-Centric Retrieval in the LLM Era (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 36 | Qinggang Zhang | 31 | 3 | 35 You Don't Need Pre-Built Graphs for RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Adaptive Reasoning Structures (2026) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 34 Facilitating Generative Retrieval with Logical Denoising for Interpretable Conversational Search (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG |
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| 37 | Wenyu Huang | 31 | 3 | 31 Masking in Multi-hop QA: An Analysis of How Language Models Perform with Context Permutation (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA 30 Prompting large language models with knowledge graphs for question answering involving long-tail facts (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |