# How to Train Your Fact Verifier: Knowledge Transfer with Multimodal Open Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00369 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00369/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)
- [The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04790/) (2020)
- [UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00700/) (2020)
- ["Liar, Liar Pants on Fire": A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00648/) (2017)
- [Get Your Vitamin C! Robust Fact Verification with Contrastive Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08541/) (2021)
- [Automatic Detection of Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07104/) (2017)
- [Automated Fact-Checking for Assisting Human Fact-Checkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07769/) (2021)
- [Generating Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05773/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Multimodal Fact-Checking and Explanation Generation: A Challenging Dataset and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12487/) (2022)
- [Exploring Hate Speech Detection in Multimodal Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03814/) (2019)
- [Evidentiality-guided Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08688/) (2021)
- [Language Models Hallucinate, but May Excel at Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14564/) (2023)
- [NELA-GT-2020: A Large Multi-Labelled News Dataset for The Study of Misinformation in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04567/) (2021)
- [News Verifiers Showdown: A Comparative Performance Evaluation of ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4.0, Bing AI, and Bard in News Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17176/) (2023)
- [On Unifying Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05243/) (2021)
- [Are Large Language Models Good Fact Checkers: A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17355/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [GAMED: Knowledge Adaptive Multi-Experts Decoupling for Multimodal Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12164/) (2024)
- [LlamaLens: Specialized Multilingual LLM for Analyzing News and Social Media Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15308/) (2024)
- [Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Adaptive Multimodal Fact-Checking with Visual Evidence Necessity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04692/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Given the growing influx of misinformation across news and social media, there is a critical need for systems that can provide effective real-time verification of news claims. Large language or multimodal model based verification has been proposed to scale up online policing mechanisms for mitigating spread of false and harmful content. While these can potentially reduce burden on human fact-checkers, such efforts may be hampered by foundation model training data becoming outdated. In this work, we test the limits of improving foundation model performance without continual updating through an initial study of knowledge transfer using either existing intra- and inter- domain benchmarks or explanations generated from large language models (LLMs). We evaluate on 12 public benchmarks for fact-checking and misinformation detection as well as two other tasks relevant to content moderation -- toxicity and stance detection. Our results on two recent multi-modal fact-checking benchmarks, Mocheg and Fakeddit, indicate that knowledge transfer strategies can improve Fakeddit performance over the state-of-the-art by up to 1.7% and Mocheg performance by up to 2.9%.