Towards Unified Multimodal Misinformation Detection in Social Media: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline

Detecting deceptive multimodal content on social media has become an increasingly important problem. Two major types of deception dominate: human-crafted misinformation (e.g., rumors and misleading posts) and AI-generated content produced by image synthesis models or vision-language models (VLMs). However, these two types are usually addressed as separate tasks. Consequently, existing models are often specialized for only one type of fake content. In real deployments, however, the fake-content type of an incoming multimodal post is typically unknown, which limits the practicality of such specialized systems. To study this setting, we build OmniFake, a benchmark with 98K samples that combines human-curated misinformation from existing resources with newly created AI-generated examples. To address this new task, we propose Unified Multimodal Fake Content Detection (UMFDet), a framework designed to handle both types of deception. UMFDet builds on a VLM backbone augmented with a Category-aware Mixture-of-Experts (CMoE) adapter to capture category-specific cues. We further introduce an Expert-wise Discriminative Regularization to enforce intra-expert compactness. In addition, cross-modal consistency alignment is proposed to improve the perceptual capability of experts for handling different deception types. Experiments show that UMFDet consistently outperforms competitive specialized baselines across both deception types.