# SNIFFER: Multimodal Large Language Model for Explainable Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03170 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03170/

## Key facts

- Cited by 74 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 38 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-jailbreaks-and-adversarial-robustness/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03726/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Foundation Models: From Specialists to General-Purpose Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10020/) (2023)
- [DeepFakes and Beyond: A Survey of Face Manipulation and Fake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00179/) (2020)
- [Woodpecker: Hallucination Correction for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16045/) (2023)
- [Visual News: Benchmark and Challenges in News Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03743/) (2020)
- [NewsCLIPpings: Automatic Generation of Out-of-Context Multimodal Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05893/) (2021)
- [Detecting and Grounding Multi-Modal Media Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02556/) (2023)
- [Open-Domain, Content-based, Multi-modal Fact-checking of Out-of-Context Images via Online Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00061/) (2021)
- [Socially Responsible AI Algorithms: Issues, Purposes, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02032/) (2021)
- [Fact-Checking Meets Fauxtography: Verifying Claims About Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11722/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Multi-domain Visual Information for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04472/) (2019)
- [Improving Fake News Detection by Using an Entity-enhanced Framework to Fuse Diverse Multimodal Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10509/) (2021)
- [The Role of User Profile for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13355/) (2019)
- [FakeSV: A Multimodal Benchmark with Rich Social Context for Fake News Detection on Short Video Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10973/) (2022)
- [VERITE: A Robust Benchmark for Multimodal Misinformation Detection Accounting for Unimodal Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14133/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 74)

- [MMFakeBench: A Mixed-Source Multimodal Misinformation Detection Benchmark for LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08772/) (2024)
- [DEFAME: Dynamic Evidence-based FAct-checking with Multimodal Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10510/) (2024)
- [Safe RLHF-V: Safe Reinforcement Learning from Multi-modal Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17682/) (2025)
- [Unmasking Digital Falsehoods: A Comparative Analysis of LLM-Based Misinformation Detection Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00724/) (2025)
- [COVE: COntext and VEracity prediction for out-of-context images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01194/) (2025)
- [Fact-R1: Towards Explainable Video Misinformation Detection with Deep Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16836/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models to Support Real-World Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03627/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Misinformation Detection by Learning from Synthetic Data with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19656/) (2024)
- [Forensics-Bench: A Comprehensive Forgery Detection Benchmark Suite for Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15024/) (2025)
- [Hallucination to Truth: A Review of Fact-Checking and Factuality Evaluation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03860/) (2025)
- [Survey on AI-Generated Media Detection: From Non-MLLM to MLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05240/) (2025)
- [Similarity over Factuality: Are we making progress on multimodal out-of-context misinformation detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13488/) (2024)
- [Each Fake News is Fake in its Own Way: An Attribution Multi-Granularity Benchmark for Multimodal Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14686/) (2024)
- [TRUST-VL: An Explainable News Assistant for General Multimodal Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04448/) (2025)
- [Customized large language models can outperform Community Notes in correcting misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11169/) (2024)
- [VLDBench Evaluating Multimodal Disinformation with Regulatory Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11361/) (2025)
- [E2LVLM:Evidence-Enhanced Large Vision-Language Model for Multimodal Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10455/) (2025)
- [XFacta: Contemporary, Real-World Dataset and Evaluation for Multimodal Misinformation Detection with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09999/) (2025)
- [CMIE: Combining MLLM Insights with External Evidence for Explainable Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23449/) (2025)
- [The Next Phase of Scientific Fact-Checking: Advanced Evidence Retrieval from Complex Structured Academic Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20844/) (2025)
- [ForenX: Towards Explainable AI-Generated Image Detection with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01402/) (2025)
- [Drifting Away from Truth: GenAI-Driven News Diversity Challenges LVLM-Based Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12711/) (2025)
- [The Paradigm Shift: A Comprehensive Survey on Large Vision Language Models for Multimodal Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15316/) (2026)
- [Fake News Detection: Comparative Evaluation of BERT-like Models and Large Language Models with Generative AI-Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14276/) (2024)
- [Verifying Cross-modal Entity Consistency in News using Vision-language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11403/) (2025)
- [Seeing Through Deception: Uncovering Misleading Creator Intent in Multimodal News with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15489/) (2025)
- [ViQAgent: Zero-Shot Video Question Answering via Agent with Open-Vocabulary Grounding Validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15928/) (2025)
- ["Image, Tell me your story!" Predicting the original meta-context of visual misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09939/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Inverse Attention Network with Intrinsic Discriminant Feature Exploitation for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01699/) (2025)
- [T^2Agent A Tool-augmented Multimodal Misinformation Detection Agent with Monte Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19768/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Misinformation is a prevalent societal issue due to its potential high risks. Out-of-context (OOC) misinformation, where authentic images are repurposed with false text, is one of the easiest and most effective ways to mislead audiences. Current methods focus on assessing image-text consistency but lack convincing explanations for their judgments, which is essential for debunking misinformation. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have rich knowledge and innate capability for visual reasoning and explanation generation, they still lack sophistication in understanding and discovering the subtle crossmodal differences. In this paper, we introduce SNIFFER, a novel multimodal large language model specifically engineered for OOC misinformation detection and explanation. SNIFFER employs two-stage instruction tuning on InstructBLIP. The first stage refines the model's concept alignment of generic objects with news-domain entities and the second stage leverages language-only GPT-4 generated OOC-specific instruction data to fine-tune the model's discriminatory powers. Enhanced by external tools and retrieval, SNIFFER not only detects inconsistencies between text and image but also utilizes external knowledge for contextual verification. Our experiments show that SNIFFER surpasses the original MLLM by over 40% and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in detection accuracy. SNIFFER also provides accurate and persuasive explanations as validated by quantitative and human evaluations.