Toward Effective and Transferable Detection for Multi-Modal Fake News in the Social Media Stream

The rapid proliferation of multimedia fake news on social media has raised significant concerns in recent years. Existing studies on fake news detection predominantly adopt an instance-based paradigm, where the detector evaluates a single post to determine its veracity. Despite notable advancements achieved in this domain, we argue that the instance-based approach is misaligned with real-world deployment scenarios. In practice, detectors typically operate on servers that process incoming posts in temporal order, striving to assess their authenticity promptly. Instance-based detectors lack awareness of temporal information and contextual relationships between surrounding posts, therefore fail to capture long-range dependencies from the timeline. To bridge this gap, we introduce a more practical stream-based multi-modal fake news detection paradigm, which assumes that social media posts arrive continuously over time and allows the utilization of previously seen posts to aid in the classification of incoming ones. To enable effective and transferable fake news detection under this novel paradigm, we propose maintaining historical knowledge as a collection of incremental high-level forgery patterns. Based on this principle, we design a novel framework called Incremental Forgery Pattern Learning and Clues Refinement (IPLCR). IPLCR incrementally learns high-level forgery patterns as the stream evolves, leveraging this knowledge to improve the detection of newly arrived posts. At the core of IPLCR is the Incremental Forgery Pattern Bank (IPB), which dynamically summarizes historical posts into a set of latent forgery patterns. IPB is designed to continuously incorporate timely knowledge and actively discard obsolete information, even during inference. When a new post arrives, IPLCR retrieves the most relevant forgery pattern knowledge from IPB and refines the clues for fake news detection. The refined clues are subsequently incorporated into IPB to enrich its knowledge base. Extensive experiments validate IPLCR’s effectiveness as a robust stream-based detector. Moreover, IPLCR addresses several critical issues relevant to industrial applications, including seamless context transfer and efficient model upgrading, making it a practical solution for real-world deployment.