Disentangling Fact from Sentiment: A Dynamic Conflict-Consensus Framework for Multimodal Fake News Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Dynamic Conflict-Consensus Framework (DCCF), a novel multimodal fake news detection method that amplifies cross-modal contradictions to improve detection accuracy.

Contribution

DCCF uniquely decouples inputs into Fact and Sentiment spaces and employs physics-inspired dynamics to extract and leverage contradictions for fake news detection.

Findings

DCCF outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an average accuracy increase of 3.52%.

Extensive experiments on three datasets validate the effectiveness of DCCF.

The framework effectively distinguishes objective mismatches from emotional dissonance.

Abstract

Prevalent multimodal fake news detection relies on consistency-based fusion, yet this paradigm fundamentally misinterprets critical cross-modal discrepancies as noise, leading to over-smoothing, which dilutes critical evidence of fabrication. Mainstream consistency-based fusion inherently minimizes feature discrepancies to align modalities, yet this approach fundamentally fails because it inadvertently smoothes out the subtle cross-modal contradictions that serve as the primary evidence of fabrication. To address this, we propose the Dynamic Conflict-Consensus Framework (DCCF), an inconsistency-seeking paradigm designed to amplify rather than suppress contradictions. First, DCCF decouples inputs into independent Fact and Sentiment spaces to distinguish objective mismatches from emotional dissonance. Second, we employ physics-inspired feature dynamics to iteratively polarize these representations, actively extracting maximally informative conflicts. Finally, a conflict-consensus mechanism standardizes these local discrepancies against the global context for robust deliberative judgment.Extensive experiments conducted on three real world datasets demonstrate that DCCF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 3.52\%.