# ZoFia: Zero-Shot Fake News Detection with Entity-Guided Retrieval and Multi-LLM Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01188 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01188/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19118/) (2023)
- [ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07201/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Prompt Cache: Modular Attention Reuse for Low-Latency Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04934/) (2023)
- [Don't Hallucinate, Abstain: Identifying LLM Knowledge Gaps via Multi-LLM Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00367/) (2024)
- [Can LLM-Generated Misinformation Be Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13788/) (2023)
- [Fake News Detection on Social Media using Geometric Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06673/) (2019)
- [Cognitive Bias in Decision-Making with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00811/) (2024)
- [Towards LLM-based Fact Verification on News Claims with a Hierarchical Step-by-Step Prompting Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00305/) (2023)
- [MDFEND: Multi-domain Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00987/) (2022)
- [Stance Detection with Collaborative Role-Infused LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10467/) (2023)
- [Blinded by Generated Contexts: How Language Models Merge Generated and Retrieved Contexts When Knowledge Conflicts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11911/) (2024)
- [Fair Text-to-Image Diffusion via Fair Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17695/) (2023)
- [The Truth Becomes Clearer Through Debate! Multi-Agent Systems with Large Language Models Unmask Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08532/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Fake News: Fundamental Theories, Detection Methods, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00315/) (2018)
- [Evaluating the Efficacy of Open-Source LLMs in Enterprise-Specific RAG Systems: A Comparative Study of Performance and Scalability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11424/) (2024)
- [Web Retrieval Agents for Evidence-Based Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00009/) (2024)
- [Text Guided Image Editing with Automatic Concept Locating and Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19708/) (2024)
- [Investigating Large Language Models for Code Vulnerability Detection: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18260/) (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)
- [Unveiling Confirmation Bias in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12301/) (2025)
- [Challenges and Innovations in LLM-Powered Fake News Detection: A Synthesis of Approaches and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00339/) (2025)
- [Improving Entity Linking through Semantic Reinforced Entity Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08495/) (2021)
- [VeraCT Scan: Retrieval-Augmented Fake News Detection with Justifiable Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10289/) (2024)
- [Improving Generalizability of Fake News Detection Methods using Propensity Score Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00838/) (2020)
- [Fake News Detection: It's All in the Data!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02122/) (2024)

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

- [ExpSeek: Self-Triggered Experience Seeking for Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08605/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid spread of fake news threatens social stability and public trust, highlighting the urgent need for its effective detection. Although large language models (LLMs) show potential in fake news detection, they are limited by knowledge cutoff and easily generate factual hallucinations when handling time-sensitive news. Furthermore, the thinking of a single LLM easily falls into early stance locking and confirmation bias, making it hard to handle both content reasoning and fact checking simultaneously. To address these challenges, we propose ZoFia, a two-stage zero-shot fake news detection framework. In the first retrieval stage, we propose novel Hierarchical Salience and Salience-Calibrated Minimum Marginal Relevance (SC-MMR) algorithm to extract core entities accurately, which drive dual-source retrieval to overcome knowledge and evidence gaps. In the subsequent stage, a multi-agent system conducts multi-perspective reasoning and verification in parallel and achieves an explainable and robust result via adversarial debate. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets show that ZoFia outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and even most few-shot methods. Our code has been open-sourced to facilitate the research community at https://github.com/SakiRinn/ZoFia.