Multimodal rumor detection enhanced by external evidence and forgery features

Abstract

Social media increasingly disseminates information through mixed image text posts, but rumors often exploit subtle inconsistencies and forged content, making detection based solely on post content difficult. Deep semantic mismatch rumors, which superficially align images and texts, pose particular challenges and threaten online public opinion. Existing multimodal rumor detection methods improve cross modal modeling but suffer from limited feature extraction, noisy alignment, and inflexible fusion strategies, while ignoring external factual evidence necessary for verifying complex rumors. To address these limitations, we propose a multimodal rumor detection model enhanced with external evidence and forgery features. The model uses a ResNet34 visual encoder, a BERT text encoder, and a forgery feature module extracting frequency domain traces and compression artifacts via Fourier transformation. While some existing approaches employ large scale generative vision language models for caption generation, their open ended generation tendency produces verbose and stylistically inconsistent descriptions that introduce semantic noise and risk drifting from actual image content. To overcome this, we adopt BLIP specifically pre trained for vision language alignment which generates concise, image faithful descriptions stylistically closer to news text, serving as a reliable semantic bridge across modalities. A BLIP Driven Semantic Alignment Module jointly optimizes text image and text description contrastive losses, capturing inconsistencies at both visual and semantic levels. A gated adaptive feature scaling fusion mechanism dynamically adjusts multimodal fusion and reduces redundancy. Experiments on Weibo and Twitter datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms mainstream baselines in,recall,and F1 score