UNITE-FND: Reframing Multimodal Fake News Detection through Unimodal Scene Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mukherjee, Arka, Ghosh, Shreya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mukherjee, Arka
Ghosh, Shreya
author_facet Mukherjee, Arka
Ghosh, Shreya
contents Multimodal fake news detection typically demands complex architectures and substantial computational resources, posing deployment challenges in real-world settings. We introduce UNITE-FND, a novel framework that reframes multimodal fake news detection as a unimodal text classification task. We propose six specialized prompting strategies with Gemini 1.5 Pro, converting visual content into structured textual descriptions, and enabling efficient text-only models to preserve critical visual information. To benchmark our approach, we introduce Uni-Fakeddit-55k, a curated dataset family of 55,000 samples each, each processed through our multimodal-to-unimodal translation framework. Experimental results demonstrate that UNITE-FND achieves 92.52% accuracy in binary classification, surpassing prior multimodal models while reducing computational costs by over 10x (TinyBERT variant: 14.5M parameters vs. 250M+ in SOTA models). Additionally, we propose a comprehensive suite of five novel metrics to evaluate image-to-text conversion quality, ensuring optimal information preservation. Our results demonstrate that structured text-based representations can replace direct multimodal processing with minimal loss of accuracy, making UNITE-FND a practical and scalable alternative for resource-constrained environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_11132
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UNITE-FND: Reframing Multimodal Fake News Detection through Unimodal Scene Translation
Mukherjee, Arka
Ghosh, Shreya
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Multimodal fake news detection typically demands complex architectures and substantial computational resources, posing deployment challenges in real-world settings. We introduce UNITE-FND, a novel framework that reframes multimodal fake news detection as a unimodal text classification task. We propose six specialized prompting strategies with Gemini 1.5 Pro, converting visual content into structured textual descriptions, and enabling efficient text-only models to preserve critical visual information. To benchmark our approach, we introduce Uni-Fakeddit-55k, a curated dataset family of 55,000 samples each, each processed through our multimodal-to-unimodal translation framework. Experimental results demonstrate that UNITE-FND achieves 92.52% accuracy in binary classification, surpassing prior multimodal models while reducing computational costs by over 10x (TinyBERT variant: 14.5M parameters vs. 250M+ in SOTA models). Additionally, we propose a comprehensive suite of five novel metrics to evaluate image-to-text conversion quality, ensuring optimal information preservation. Our results demonstrate that structured text-based representations can replace direct multimodal processing with minimal loss of accuracy, making UNITE-FND a practical and scalable alternative for resource-constrained environments.
title UNITE-FND: Reframing Multimodal Fake News Detection through Unimodal Scene Translation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11132