Multimodal fake news detection via progressive fusion networks

Multimodal fake news detection methods based on semantic information have achieved great success. However, these methods only exploit the deep features of multimodal information, which leads to a large loss of valid information at the shallow level. To address this problem, we propose a progressive fusion network (MPFN) for multimodal disinformation detection, which captures the representational information of each modality at different levels and achieves fusion between modalities at the same level and at different levels by means of a mixer to establish a strong connection between the modalities. Specifically, we use a transformer structure, which is effective in computer vision tasks, as a visual feature extractor to gradually sample features at different levels and combine features obtained from a text feature extractor and image frequency domain information at different levels for fine-grained modeling. In addition, we design a feature fusion approach to better establish connections between modalities, which can further improve the performance and thus surpass other network structures in the literature. We conducted extensive experiments on two real datasets, Weibo and Twitter, where our method achieved 83.3% accuracy on the Twitter dataset, which has increased by at least 4.3% compared to other state-of-the-art methods. This demonstrates the effectiveness of MPFN for identifying fake news, and the method reaches a relatively advanced level by combining different levels of information from each modality and a powerful modality fusion method.