# GAMC: An Unsupervised Method for Fake News Detection using Graph Autoencoder with Masking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.05739 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05739/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [GraphRNN: Generating Realistic Graphs with Deep Auto-regressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08773/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Self-supervised Learning on Graphs: Contrastive, Generative,or Predictive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07342/) (2021)
- [User Preference-aware Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12259/) (2021)
- [Jointly embedding the local and global relations of heterogeneous graph for rumor detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04465/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Domain-agnostic Fake News Detection using Multi-modal Weak Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11349/) (2023)
- [Sequential Attention Source Identification Based on Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15886/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [A General Black-box Adversarial Attack on Graph-based Fake News Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15744/) (2024)
- [DiffGAD: A Diffusion-based Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06549/) (2024)
- [Truth over Tricks: Measuring and Mitigating Shortcut Learning in Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02350/) (2025)
- [Is LLMs Hallucination Usable? LLM-based Negative Reasoning for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09153/) (2025)
- [A Macro- and Micro-Hierarchical Transfer Learning Framework for Cross-Domain Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14403/) (2025)
- [Collaborative Evolution: Multi-Round Learning Between Large and Small Language Models for Emergent Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21127/) (2025)
- [Boosting Bot Detection via Heterophily-Aware Representation Learning and Prototype-Guided Cluster Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00989/) (2025)
- [KEN: Knowledge Augmentation and Emotion Guidance Network for Multimodal Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09647/) (2025)
- [LOSS-GAT: Label Propagation and One-Class Semi-Supervised Graph Attention Network for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08401/) (2024)
- [MPPFND: A Dataset and Analysis of Detecting Fake News with Multi-Platform Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15834/) (2025)
- [SEER: Semantic Enhancement and Emotional Reasoning Network for Multimodal Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13415/) (2025)
- [Bridging Thoughts and Words: Graph-Based Intent-Semantic Joint Learning for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01660/) (2025)
- [LLM-based Contrastive Self-Supervised AMR Learning with Masked Graph Autoencoders for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18819/) (2025)
- [The Impact of Data Characteristics on GNN Evaluation for Detecting Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06638/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rise of social media, the spread of fake news has become a significant concern, potentially misleading public perceptions and impacting social stability. Although deep learning methods like CNNs, RNNs, and Transformer-based models like BERT have enhanced fake news detection, they primarily focus on content, overlooking social context during news propagation. Graph-based techniques have incorporated this social context but are limited by the need for large labeled datasets. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces GAMC, an unsupervised fake news detection technique using the Graph Autoencoder with Masking and Contrastive learning. By leveraging both the context and content of news propagation as self-supervised signals, our method negates the requirement for labeled datasets. We augment the original news propagation graph, encode these with a graph encoder, and employ a graph decoder for reconstruction. A unique composite loss function, including reconstruction error and contrast loss, is designed. The method's contributions are: introducing self-supervised learning to fake news detection, proposing a graph autoencoder integrating two distinct losses, and validating our approach's efficacy through real-world dataset experiments.