Multimodal Fusion Network with Latent Topic Memory for Rumor Detection

In this paper, we propose a multimodal fusion network (termed as MFN) to integrate the text and image data from social media for rumor detection. Given the multimodal features, MFN exploits self-attentive fusion (SAF) mechanism to conduct feature-level fusion by assigning corresponding weights to the complementary modalities. In particular, the textual features are combined with the fused features in a skip-connection manner, as textual features tend to be more distinguishable compared with visual features. Furthermore, MFN introduces latent topic memory (LTM) to store the semantic information about rumor and non-rumor events, benefiting to the identification of the upcoming posts. Extensive experiments conducted on two public datasets show that the proposed MFN outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.