# MDFEND: Multi-domain Fake News Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.00987 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00987/

## Key facts

- Cited by 68 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4053/) (2014)
- ["Liar, Liar Pants on Fire": A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00648/) (2017)
- [Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01967/) (2017)
- [FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context and Spatialtemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01286/) (2018)
- [CoAID: COVID-19 Healthcare Misinformation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00885/) (2020)
- [Embracing Domain Differences in Fake News: Cross-domain Fake News Detection using Multi-modal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06314/) (2021)
- [CED: Credible Early Detection of Social Media Rumors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04175/) (2018)
- [Ginger Cannot Cure Cancer: Battling Fake Health News with a Comprehensive Data Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00837/) (2020)
- [Learning to Expand Audience via Meta Hybrid Experts and Critics for Recommendation and Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14688/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Bad Actor, Good Advisor: Exploring the Role of Large Language Models in Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12247/) (2023)
- [Generalizing to the Future: Mitigating Entity Bias in Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09484/) (2022)
- [Zoom Out and Observe: News Environment Perception for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10885/) (2022)
- [The Truth Becomes Clearer Through Debate! Multi-Agent Systems with Large Language Models Unmask Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08532/) (2025)
- [Bootstrapping Multi-view Representations for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05741/) (2022)
- [Emotion Detection for Misinformation: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00671/) (2023)
- [Learn over Past, Evolve for Future: Forecasting Temporal Trends for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14728/) (2023)
- [Improving Fake News Detection of Influential Domain via Domain- and Instance-Level Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08902/) (2022)
- [Generative Large Language Models in Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02351/) (2024)
- [FinMTEB: Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10990/) (2025)
- [FakeGPT: Fake News Generation, Explanation and Detection of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05046/) (2023)
- [Let Silence Speak: Enhancing Fake News Detection with Generated Comments from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16631/) (2024)
- [Multi-modal Fake News Detection on Social Media via Multi-grained Information Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00827/) (2023)
- [Combating Online Misinformation Videos: Characterization, Detection, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03242/) (2023)
- [RAEmoLLM: Retrieval Augmented LLMs for Cross-Domain Misinformation Detection Using In-Context Learning Based on Emotional Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11093/) (2024)
- [Hallucination to Truth: A Review of Fact-Checking and Factuality Evaluation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03860/) (2025)
- [Do We Need Domain-Specific Embedding Models? An Empirical Investigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18511/) (2024)
- [Debate-to-Detect: Reformulating Misinformation Detection as a Real-World Debate with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18596/) (2025)
- [Exploiting User Comments for Early Detection of Fake News Prior to Users' Commenting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10429/) (2023)
- [Characterizing Multi-Domain False News and Underlying User Effects on Chinese Weibo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03068/) (2022)
- [Investigating Online Financial Misinformation and Its Consequences: A Computational Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12363/) (2023)
- [Modality Interactive Mixture-of-Experts for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12431/) (2025)
- [GAME-ON: Graph Attention Network based Multimodal Fusion for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12478/) (2022)
- [Out-of-distribution Evidence-aware Fake News Detection via Dual Adversarial Debiasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12888/) (2023)
- [Combating Health Misinformation in Social Media: Characterization, Detection, Intervention, and Open Issues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05289/) (2022)
- [FineFake: A Knowledge-Enriched Dataset for Fine-Grained Multi-Domain Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01336/) (2024)
- [A Multi-Agent Framework with Automated Decision Rule Optimization for Cross-Domain Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23329/) (2025)
- [The Paradigm Shift: A Comprehensive Survey on Large Vision Language Models for Multimodal Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15316/) (2026)
- [Detect, Investigate, Judge and Determine: A Knowledge-guided Framework for Few-shot Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08952/) (2024)
- [LLM-GAN: Construct Generative Adversarial Network Through Large Language Models For Explainable Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01787/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fake news spread widely on social media in various domains, which lead to real-world threats in many aspects like politics, disasters, and finance. Most existing approaches focus on single-domain fake news detection (SFND), which leads to unsatisfying performance when these methods are applied to multi-domain fake news detection. As an emerging field, multi-domain fake news detection (MFND) is increasingly attracting attention. However, data distributions, such as word frequency and propagation patterns, vary from domain to domain, namely domain shift. Facing the challenge of serious domain shift, existing fake news detection techniques perform poorly for multi-domain scenarios. Therefore, it is demanding to design a specialized model for MFND. In this paper, we first design a benchmark of fake news dataset for MFND with domain label annotated, namely Weibo21, which consists of 4,488 fake news and 4,640 real news from 9 different domains. We further propose an effective Multi-domain Fake News Detection Model (MDFEND) by utilizing a domain gate to aggregate multiple representations extracted by a mixture of experts. The experiments show that MDFEND can significantly improve the performance of multi-domain fake news detection. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/kennqiang/MDFEND-Weibo21.