# A Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation Neural Network for Explainable Fake News Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14642 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14642/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02257/) (2017)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Multi-Task Learning with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10704/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- ["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)
- [SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04230/) (2016)
- [Explainable Automated Fact-Checking for Public Health Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09926/) (2020)
- [MultiFC: A Real-World Multi-Domain Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact Checking of Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03242/) (2019)
- [Generating Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05773/) (2020)
- [Combining Fact Extraction and Verification with Neural Semantic Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07039/) (2018)
- [GCAN: Graph-aware Co-Attention Networks for Explainable Fake News Detection on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11648/) (2020)
- [DeClarE: Debunking Fake News and False Claims using Evidence-Aware Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06416/) (2018)
- [Explainable Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03870/) (2020)
- [A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05638/) (2017)
- [XFake: Explainable Fake News Detector with Visualizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07757/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Towards LLM-based Fact Verification on News Claims with a Hierarchical Step-by-Step Prompting Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00305/) (2023)
- [Explainable Fake News Detection With Large Language Model via Defense Among Competing Wisdom](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03371/) (2024)
- [FactLLaMA: Optimizing Instruction-Following Language Models with External Knowledge for Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00240/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Rumor Detection with Propagation Structure via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01117/) (2022)
- [JustiLM: Few-shot Justification Generation for Explainable Fact-Checking of Real-world Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08026/) (2024)
- [Claim Verification in the Age of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14317/) (2024)
- [Hallucination to Truth: A Review of Fact-Checking and Factuality Evaluation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03860/) (2025)
- [Fact in Fragments: Deconstructing Complex Claims via LLM-based Atomic Fact Extraction and Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07446/) (2025)
- [RW-Post: Auditable Evidence-Grounded Multimodal Fact-Checking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10357/) (2026)
- [Are Rationales Necessary and Sufficient? Tuning LLMs for Explainable Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19285/) (2026)
- [Fact-checking based fake news detection: a review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01717/) (2024)
- [RW-Post: Auditable Evidence-Grounded Multimodal Fact-Checking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22933/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing fake news detection methods aim to classify a piece of news as true or false and provide veracity explanations, achieving remarkable performances. However, they often tailor automated solutions on manual fact-checked reports, suffering from limited news coverage and debunking delays. When a piece of news has not yet been fact-checked or debunked, certain amounts of relevant raw reports are usually disseminated on various media outlets, containing the wisdom of crowds to verify the news claim and explain its verdict. In this paper, we propose a novel Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation (CofCED) neural network for explainable fake news detection based on such raw reports, alleviating the dependency on fact-checked ones. Specifically, we first utilize a hierarchical encoder for web text representation, and then develop two cascaded selectors to select the most explainable sentences for verdicts on top of the selected top-K reports in a coarse-to-fine manner. Besides, we construct two explainable fake news datasets, which are publicly available. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and generates high-quality explanations from diverse evaluation perspectives.