# Multimodal Detection of Fake Reviews using BERT and ResNet-50

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00020 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00020/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [Supervision Exists Everywhere: A Data Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05208/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Survey on Fake Review Detection: From Pre-trained Language Models to Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30292/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the current digital commerce landscape, user-generated reviews play a critical role in shaping consumer behavior, product reputation, and platform credibility. However, the proliferation of fake or misleading reviews often generated by bots, paid agents, or AI models poses a significant threat to trust and transparency within review ecosystems. Existing detection models primarily rely on unimodal, typically textual, data and therefore fail to capture semantic inconsistencies across different modalities. To address this gap, a robust multimodal fake review detection framework is proposed, integrating textual features encoded with BERT and visual features extracted using ResNet-50. These representations are fused through a classification head to jointly predict review authenticity. To support this approach, a curated dataset comprising 21,142 user-uploaded images across food delivery, hospitality, and e-commerce domains was utilized. Experimental results indicate that the multimodal model outperforms unimodal baselines, achieving an F1-score of 0.934 on the test set. Additionally, the confusion matrix and qualitative analysis highlight the model's ability to detect subtle inconsistencies, such as exaggerated textual praise paired with unrelated or low-quality images, commonly found in deceptive content. This study demonstrates the critical role of multimodal learning in safeguarding digital trust and offers a scalable solution for content moderation across various online platforms.